Managing your fuel inventory is a critical part of your business, and you owe it to yourself and team to apply proven best practices. When you optimize your fuel inventory, you can save time, conserve cash and grow your profits, all of which are invaluable in a successful fuel marketing business. Here are five practical steps you can take to get more out of your fuel inventories.
- Use Real-Time Information—Events move quickly at your fuel stations and you need to know what’s happening. That means automatic tank gauges in all of your tanks. Configure them to update at least every 15 minutes and download the data into a centralized application.
- Balance Your Inventory Daily—Balancing your fuel inventory weekly or monthly is not enough. Only daily balancing can confirm that your planning assumptions are still valid, or verify that your automatic gauge control system is working properly. Daily balancing can also flag you that the unexpected has happened, like a leak, theft or sudden spike in demand.
- Use a Planning Tool—Daily balancing means that you’re going to put more time and effort into fuel management. You can make a spreadsheet to try to manage multiple locations, but spreadsheets often require manual updating and they don’t have sophisticated forecasting algorithms and user alerts. At the minimum, specify a fuel inventory management package that supports automatic inventory updates and features alerts, alarms, forecasting and market data feeds that can help you manage purchases, deliveries and sudden demand shifts.
- Train Your Specialists—Even the most powerful fuel inventory management system needs the right people running it. A key best practice is to train at least two people (a primary and a back-up) to be fuel inventory specialists. Training should cover everything required to help them make smart decisions—familiarity with the automatic data collection equipment, in-depth instruction and practice on system software, market pricing tools and your company’s operating rules for fuel inventory.
- Develop Your Processes—Having trained people and the right fuel inventory software package is a jumping off point. The final step is to make all this work for your business.
Your first priority should be to apply just-in-time inventory practices to your multiple locations and fuel products. Along with that, you need to enable your software’s analysis and forecasting capabilities so you can take advantage of changing market conditions and opportunities. Over time, your team will use the new software to create and test procedures and decision rules for buying fuel and dispatching it to your locations. Results won’t happen instantly, but very soon you’ll see real improvements in day-to-day operations.
Last fall, Pinnacle announced a partnership with DreamTec Software Ltd., providing the most comprehensive fuel inventory management and logistics solution on the market. By integrating with DreamTec, Pinnacle extends its fuel inventory management suite of solutions to solve fuel marketers’ unknowns of real-time delivery status tracking, giving them visibility to truck and driver field activity.
Pinnacle fuel solutions and DreamTec will be an integrated system versus an interface that requires numerous configuration points. Using mobile technology and cloud services, dispatchers can monitor their delivery processes in real time, eliminate the paperwork involved and give accurate information to their customers, reducing the overall costs and potential liabilities associated with fuel delivery. In addition, tracking of vehicle GPS coordinates improves customer service and routing efficiencies, managing the entire logistics process from end to end—including load tracking, truck and driver logs and tank wagon management. Pinnacle and DreamTec fuel solutions will also seamlessly integrate with iMeter for non-gravity drop product movement.
Pinnacle’s enterprise fuel inventory management solution includes tightly integrated processes to ensure fuel marketers have the tools to efficiently navigate the rapidly evolving retail fuel market by providing accurate and timely inventory, financial and operations reporting. Residing between the fuel inventory management solution and the mobile device in the vehicle, DreamTec’s integrated office dashboard will provide a live picture of every vehicle in the fleet, which can be filtered by depot or by truck, provide visibility to what customer deliveries have been made, at what time, and how much stock has been dispensed, all while having visibility on a Google Map where the activity took place.
Melissa Fox Hadley, Pinnacle’s Director of Product Management, adds, “Pinnacle has been providing the best fuel inventory management solution to some of the biggest names in the retail convenience store and fuel marketer business for over 25 years. With the addition of DreamTec’s truck management and logistics products and services, our integrated enterprise solution offers customers the tools to drive maximum value from their assets and give them a new level of control over their fuel operations.”
DreamTec Software Limited, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, is a well-established supplier of high-value mobile technologies to the fuel distribution market. Focused on researching and delivering robust, innovative, hardworking solutions that allow customers do a better job, Paul Foley, CEO of DreamTec, is delighted to partner with Pinnacle Corporation. “Over many years, we have delivered high-value mobile technologies to fuel distributors in Europe and we are excited to be partnering with a premium technology supplier, The Pinnacle Corporation, in the U.S. to make these solutions available to their customers. Working together, we will deliver high value technology and services that will have a real impact on the bottom-line.”
