The largest expenses for heating oil and propane distributors are those related to deliveries. Fixed fleet costs including trucks, insurance, and maintenance, as well as variable costs of wages and fuel during the heating season that always seem to be on the rise. The trick… deliver all your gallons with fewer trucks during all four seasons.…
Your biggest expenses are the fleet that delivers fuel to your customers and the wages for the drivers, dispatchers, and mechanics who make those deliveries and keep the fleet running. In many cases, those expenses can equal 75% of all of your operating expenses. You are (or should be) aware that there are new and modern ways to improve your economics. The costs are minimal relative to the benefits, the implementation is fairly easy, and the results outweigh just about anything you can do with any other delivery and dispatch technology.
In any business, in any industry, the “3 legs” that are required to support a business are Sales, Operations, and Finance. Sales can include sales, marketing, customer support and retention, data analytics, social media, etc. Operations includes “everything you do” to serve your customers. In our industry, it is primarily delivery of fuels and the installation and servicing of heating and cooling equipment. Finance includes everything from budgeting, analyzing, reporting, banking, credit, hedging, and more.
Imagine you have a job opening for a position covering the followinf responsibilities: Pull data from BOS, budget, etc., create automated custom reports fshowing customer gain/losses, budget variances, delivery history, and performance, service data, analyze customer data for outliers, coordinate with dispatch team and BOS for "smarter" deliveries...
All companies share three things: Deliveries are smaller than anticipated, Tank size is treated with more importance than consumption, and There is excess capacity for eleven months of the year. Many are wondering what the secret to flattening the curve is...
