Flyers Energy
The Challenge:
Flyers Energy is an oil and renewable energy company that transports and delivers finished product goods from refineries and storage terminals to commercial, wholesale and retail customers in California and Nevada. Founded in 1979 and headquartered in Auburn, CA, Flyers Energy operates its own transport fleet.
In the past, the company relied on a paper system to coordinate deliveries—manually updated spreadsheets and Word documents were printed and handed to drivers to manually plan their delivery routes. This laborious, error-prone method, proved to be extremely inefficient. The company’s main challenge was to optimize its distribution network by replacing its paper-based methods.
The Solution:
Flyers Energy sought a solution to organize and make their delivery operations more efficient while getting rid of the massive amount of paper that made the jobs of drivers and dispatchers cumbersome and often error-prone. The answer was Trimble’s scalable solution that included TMW.Suite and Trimble routing and dispatching software.
The software streamlined fuel order management and optimized driver-shift based scheduling. Flyers Energy also implemented the Trimble mobile platform in its trucks, so drivers could receive delivery assignments remotely in real time in the field. Trimble routing and dispatching software also helped drivers pinpoint deliveries, making them much more efficient.
The Result:
By automating the delivery process, Flyers Energy eliminated the use of hardcopy documentation for dispatching its trucks. With a full overview of operations, dispatchers are now able to plan truck drivers’ schedules in a way to prevent stations from running out of fuel and to better schedule delivery based on data analytics. The company was able to integrate its back-office systems with the new software very easily, exporting real-time data automatically and increasing report accuracy. Flyers Energy also was able to reduce staff because it can now process more orders with fewer people in the office.
While in the past Flyers Energy used different platforms to manage its distribution network, Trimble Transportation software centralized the entire process on a single platform.
Flyers Energy estimates the single platform saves about $85,000 a year.
“We have also been using the solution’s analytics feature to help us identify business areas where we can improve, looking at drivers’ safety and efficiency, predicting consumption more accurately and much more. “We’ve reduced accidents by 50% in one year and increased our load count by 15-20% daily—which means we’ve been delivering more loads safer while saving money throughout our supply chain.”
– Mike Teske, Director of Technology, Flyers Energy