"We had a very manual system and
most of the expertise of that system
was driven by what was in the human
brain," said Kerry Oliver, president of
CarterEnergy, a division of World Fuel
Services, Inc. in Overland Park, Kan.,
and senior vice president, Land North
America, World Fuel Services, Inc. "We
managed a fleet of trucks using an
old manual system called a 'T-Board'
where the dispatchers wrote out a piece
of paper and put it in the slot and then
decided which piece of paper went
in front of another piece of paper to
determine a shift of work for a driver.
"This was pre-price volatility. We
have all been talking about price volatility for the past seven or eight years.
At first, price volatility felt like an
anomaly, but it's been here to stay
and it's become even worse. You simply can't shuffle the deck of 'T-cards'
on a fleet of trucks fast enough to
know what you're doing at any given
time and whether you should pull
product or not pull product at any
given time and what to do with all of
those pieces of paper if you have to
not pull, right now, because the next
shift is already booked. It was costing
us time and energy, and it was not
allowing us to grow."
As Bevers noted, in addition to
more traditional efficiency goals like
better managing headcount, a primary
driver is shortening the payment cycle
relative to billing the retail customer.
"I would say that most people have
certainly made progress," he said. "It
used to be something like seven days,
which is pretty abysmal when you're
going to get your account drafted
ACH by a supplier. Pressure with the
prices going up so high and credit
being squeezed have caused most
fuel marketers to really work hard to
improve their processes."
areas where it excels or comes up short
compared to competing solutions. In
addition, those needs are typically spread
over both the operational and the backoffice accounting areas with many solutions being heavily focused on either area.
"Some people just go and write a
check for a piece of software because
they saw it demoed somewhere and
then they try to change the company to
work the way the software works, and
I've always felt that's a huge mistake,"
Oliver said. "You have to understand
your own business dynamics, and the
way we run our business is probably
different in many ways compared to the
First Things First
Approaching a technology transition
starts in house, with the goal of finding
the best software to serve a company's
specific needs. No two solutions are
identical, and each solution will have
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May/June 2013
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