Mistakes to Avoid
The single most common mistake that Turner and his team at FireStream Worldwide see in FMS implementations is to fail to adequately resource the project from a time and talent perspective.
“We also see marketers fail to deeply integrate fuel management with the back office,” Turnery says.
Murphy sees marketers setting unrealistic goals for the project and keeping employees and customers unprepared for the changes. “Software implementation is a collaborative effort between the software implementation team, management, and employees that are key to the business,” Murphy says. “Set expectations at a realistic level, and work towards the sky over the long term.”
Remember, no amount of software can fix a poor process. “Trying to replicate current business processes or methods of entering data without understanding how the new systems that are being evaluated can improve these processes, can result in custom programming that will increase the total cost of ownership over the life of the system,” Lane says. “Marketers should spend more time upfront with their software evaluating and re-designing or updating their current business processes based on industry best practices.
DM2’s Web Portal
Mistakes aside, the experts at ADD Systems expect that the future trend within the FMS industry will mimic the recent trend, just to a higher degree. “The trend over the last few years has been to perform more and more of the training on line,” Murphy says. “This can be an effective method for many training topics. Internet use by a wider audience has allowed digital methods of implementation and training to be accepted and embraced.”
Lane points out that connected and cloud services that compliment on-premise (installed at your physical location) systems are becoming more and more prevalent. “Hosted, monthly subscription services ranging from inventory optimization to payroll processing are now available,” Lane says. “These hybrid systems/services allow marketers to leverage their investment in their existing on-premise systems and extend their capabilities by accessing their system data, via secure internet connections, to provide marketers with additional features without having to support addition on-site software or hardware.” DM2 Software is also seeing a big trend in the adoption of integrated customer relationship management (CRM) that can access and exchange data with their accounting/enterprise resource planning systems to capture all of the communications with their customers and eliminate need to make duplicate, error prone entries from one system to the other.
Turner expects to see FMS’s handle a broader range of complex buying optimization scenarios. “If you are not contracting for the purchase of some of your gallons now, that’s something to look into rather than buying 100 percent of your supply on the spot market,” Turner says. “I also expect to see less expensive inventory monitoring hardware and better integration of GPS and truck information into the FMS process.
Cont.
