FMN: Similarly, what are the key best practices involved in dispatching? What the most important components that companies need to focus on when developing a dispatching process/procedure or investing in the technology?
Warren: The biggest mistake made is that “When we buy this technology it will just do everything for us.” A ship will float in the water but it still needs a captain at the helm. This is a very dynamic industry so even the most well laid plans will change on the fly. The technology generates a great plan so the captain can easily adapt to any changes in the day. The most important thing a company can do is establish measures of accountability for making sure the technology is being used.
Most people are resistant to change, so if they get confused or frustrated they back to what they used to do—their normal. Companies should view training and implementation as “extra cost.” These are standard parts of anything new. The army has “basic training,” which is just that and typically weeds out the weak from the strong—and training will similarly help you assess how your people line up with the technology you are implementing.
But to yield the most return on investment of any solution, you don’t just need to know how it works, you want to know how it incorporates into your business model and what features it offers that could allow you to change the way you are doing business. The solutions providers should be experts on what their product does, but the petroleum distributor also needs to absorb the technology so they don’t just replace a handwritten ticket with a digitally printed ticket. Rather they should maximize all areas of efficiency. Again let the technology do the heavy lifting and high grade your personnel to know how to review outgoing and incoming data to see issues before they occur or know inventory volumes of all assets to best hedge the market.
FMN: What are some common mistakes that companies make that can affect the efficiency of their dispatching programs?
Warren: The number one mistake is they don’t know their tank sizes. If they predominately deliver to tanks but don’t know the capacity of those tanks, then the game is over as this is one of the main variables that all other things are measured by. From an implementation standpoint, the biggest mistake is not taking ownership of the solution they just purchased and having at least one of their employees dedicated to being an expert of the technology. Once they’ve accomplished this major hurdle, then those experts need to be empowered to hold all others accountable for using the technology so it becomes their “new normal” and they don’t revert to old practices.
These experts need to encourage the other employees to ask questions, which will help them embrace how to use the technology to not just make them more efficient but make them happier. Analyzing data stimulates creativity versus the monotony of entering data, so they’ll feel more like they are contributing to the increased success of the company because they are.
FMN: What do you think the future holds for the dispatching arena? Do you envision any big modifications to the process or technological advancements that readers should know about?
Warren: The new term is “big data.” All that means is there is more information available than ever before so more things can be measured. Technology is still new to the petroleum industry so there is lots of room for growth an innovation. The biggest change that we see and have implemented is the ability to share data across customers as they have common clients.
Clouds, portals, websites-they are all the same thing just with a new name. Data can now be aggregated from multiple companies so a client can see all of their data/deliveries from multiple vendors, so they can make business decisions faster. The availability of digitally captured data is becoming better understood by the clients/end users, so now that they know it’s available they are requiring that their deliveries are digital verse manually entered or hand written on a ticket. Digital checks and balances is where it’s all headed and we are primed, ready, and riding this adoption curve.
