Your Busy Season Is Also Software Season
Most dealers are darn good at running the essential parts of their business. After many generations, organizing people, trucks, and vans to serve customers comes as second nature. But we now live in a world defined by massive competition, an ever demanding and disloyal consumer, and skyrocketing operating costs. Thus, making and preserving profits is harder than ever before. This ain’t your grandfather’s fuel business.
What can be done? First, seek to understand.
The busy season (every area has one, even the most temperate climates) is absolutely the best period to assess the performance of your company given that you are running at or near full capacity for long durations of time. There is no better opportunity to identify areas that need improvement, processes that can be optimized, and profits that are being left on the table. Smart dealers always go into analysis mode during the winter, spending as much time working on their business as they do working in it.
So why is it dubbed “software season”?
Optimizing your processes by streamlining operations cannot be done with a pencil, gut feel, and rolled up sleeves. It will always require that you embrace proven technologies to facilitate automation, efficiency, and enhanced decision making. It is also an integral part of delivering a quality “modern” experience to customers with lofty expectations.
No IT purchase is more critical and impactful than backoffice software. It is quite literally the heart of your company, the central gathering place where information and people intersect. Ask yourself if this gathering place is driving up the value of your business, making lives easier, or even if it was built in this millennium. If not, it’s time to start shopping.
What should you be looking at this winter?
Mobile. 90% of what happens in a fuel business happens in the field. Yet most dealers watch their fleet roll out in the morning and have no real idea what is occurring until it rolls back in at 4 PM. Other than cell phone and radio calls, your most important assets might as well be on the dark side of the moon. Cargas Mobile allows you to dispatch your tickets wirelessly, see your drivers and techs progress throughout the day in real-time, and receive transaction data instantly. You can send work orders, make route adjustments and send out mid-day price changes to protect margins, all with the click of a mouse. Cargas Mobile is a key part of what makes our Enterprise software so powerful.
Routing. Before the tickets ever reach the mobile devices in the trucks, the dispatchers will first need to sort them into routes and assign them to the drivers. This has traditionally been a cumbersome and slow process. Routing solutions to date have sat outside your backoffice system forcing you to move lots of data back and forth in clunky fashion. Cargas Route Planner is a state of the art routing logistics solution that is integrated directly into the backoffice software allowing for significant decreases in prep time while optimizing routes that are pushed to Cargas Mobile with full navigation. All of this greatly reduces costs in by far the most expensive area of your business.
Service Management. Many dated backoffice systems are either not equipped with a suitable service module or have a stripped down version that doesn’t meet your company’s emerging complex and nuanced needs. You shouldn’t have to purchase a separate application to accommodate your service department. Cargas Energy has a built-in service module with robust functionality, best in class scheduling and dispatch features, and full mobile capability. It can improve efficiency and profits in a department that has historically been a loss leader, something that is not acceptable in today’s challenging environment.