1. Reduce Operational Costs

Whether customer demand is at an all-time high or fluctuating wildly, the impact of excess inventory and inefficient operations can cripple your cash flow. While it’s obvious that inventory costs money, we see that most companies are not aggressively seeking to exert control and carry fewer overall liters. They choose to outsource transportation to carriers or reconsider the company fleet. But there are other ways, such as using forecasting techniques, to calculate delivery volumes, making it easy for you to ensure the customer receives the right products on time. Doing things differently can have very positive outcomes: a reduction of transportation costs, an increase in operational efficiency and a strong foundation for long-term and healthy customer relationships.

Doing things differently can have very positive outcomes.

2. Proactive Inventory Management

Inventory and transportation costs can easily represent 80% of a company’s operational expenditures. That’s why many operational managers in energy downstream distribution have started using tank monitors and telemetry to track inventory levels for their customers. However, having a system does not mean knowing how to best leverage the data. On top of that, the amount of data can be overwhelming. Having a weak grasp on your data may result in your team taking action only when a low stock alarm goes off, meaning you’re purely reactive instead of proactive. It takes more than simple visibility to effectively organize inventory management, increase efficiency and reduce costs. The best approach to aggregate data from telemetry readings in order to calculate the inventory needed is to track inventory levels over time and predict usage rates into the future. Start using ORTEC's demand forecasting capability to drive down your stock levels.

3. Manage by Exception

Combining demand forecasting with integrated order generation can further enhance the bottom line by freeing up resources and eliminating the source of data input errors. Every minute of repetitive work that can be automated is a minute that can be used to make operations more efficient. And, when optimizing route planning and dispatch, even more operational efficiencies will be achieved. Don’t wait for the customer to call your operations team to take action. Instead, empower your team to decide the allocation of service each day with the power of ORTEC.

4. Optimize Delivery Management

From experience, we know that planning and execution, fleet management and customer inventory management are departments that do not necessarily have mutual goals and challenges. The advantages of integrating these disciplines are evident. However, something as seemingly mundane as building routes each day actually requires a high degree of sophistication to get close to a good plan. There are simply more possible combinations than a human mind can create. Even a fleet of less than ten trucks can have more than ten trillion possible combination choices every day. Most companies would like their dispatchers to consider those trillions of possibilities while simultaneously trying to determine which supply points make the most sense when considering available inventory, allocations, and pricing. How can you make the best decisions in an environment like this?

The result is a significant reduction in the total inventory, accompanied by a real increase in available cash flow.

5. Impact Cash Flow with Advanced Planning

Moving from a paper-based process to manipulating orders and trucks with a support system alone will not improve operations extensively. In order to truly impact cash flow, use ORTEC's advanced planning tool to automate the planning process and optimize the delivery plan, resulting in the lowest total operating cost. ORTEC analyzes demand forecasting, order generation, driver pay, asset costs, compartment utilization, delivery windows, and supply sourcing for a reduction in the total inventory, accompanied by a real increase in available cash flow. With an advanced planning tool like this in place, your operations staff will be capable of better managing the exceptions.

ORTEC Helps You Meet & Exceed Your KPIs

Built on 40+ years of excellence in the field of logistics, our solution combines advanced forecasting based on machine learning algorithms with route optimization and real-time planning. It helps you monitor and optimize inventory levels, plan your resources in a flexible way, and schedule deliveries while considering your business’ key variables and constraints. Customers using ORTEC solutions realize the following results:

• Less distance travelled: 30% less deliveries needed and 65% reduction in redirects
• Fewer stock-outs: 15% more accurate demand forecasting
• Improved customer service: 99% on-time deliveries
• Balanced workloads: 7.5% improvement in vehicle capacity utilization
• Lower CO2 emissions: thanks to centralized planning and more efficient routes
• Compelling cost savings: 7.5% reduction in transportation and inventory costs

Learn more about ORTEC’s best-in-class solutions tailored to meet the unique supply challenges of the energy industry, and how we can help you add efficiency, realize meaningful cost and labor savings, and gain a competitive advantage.