A major petroleum company had several manual issues that led to incorrect inventory balances. Users manually updated inventory balances across storage facilities, relying on RightAngle data. This process was error-prone and time-consuming, especially during month-end closing. It required several employees to spend several hours daily, with additional hours to correct discrepancies. Inventory data was also manually transferred from RightAngle to Excel daily, lacking automation for efficiency.
Value Creed’s proposed solution approached these challenges with our proprietary digital transformation strategies. The business can now make the current process efficient for the users by reducing manual efforts, improving accuracy, providing timely information, empowering better decision-making, and generating cost savings for the business.
Annual Cost Savings: Automated data comparison, reconciliation of inventory transactions, and distribution of inventory data from multiple reports
Time Savings: Efficiency achieved by automating manual inventory management tasks
Our team of experts invested time in understanding the business’s needs and challenges, creating a solution featuring four specialized jobs: Physical Inventory Interface, Terminal Inventory Recon, Auto-Agree, and Third-Party Inventory Outbound. These jobs automated data comparison, updates, reconciliations, and scheduled report distribution.
Additionally, we developed custom reports updated by these jobs. This solution saves significant time and money by automating manual inventory tasks (estimated at 18-21 hours daily) and digitally transforming the inventory reporting system. To address the business needs, we delivered a comprehensive solution to achieve the desired results through the following services:
Business Analysis: Our team assessed the client’s business needs, gathered information, and analyzed data to identify areas for improvement.
Solution Design: We created a solution design that met the client’s requirements and incorporated best practices for digital transformation.
Custom Reports and Jobs Development: We developed custom solutions in RightAngle to automate and streamline the client’s business processes.
Data Integration: We integrated data from multiple sources and developed data integration solutions to ensure data accuracy and completeness.
Quality Assurance and Testing: We ensured the quality and reliability of the developed solutions through rigorous testing and quality assurance processes.
Project Management: We managed the project to ensure timely completion within budget and meeting client requirements.
Our Advisory services not only will help you guide your operations but also help you achieve your vision by taking all stakeholders into consideration. Our highly experienced team has combined full lifecycle, functional and technical expertise to deliver frameworks and guidance around building reliable and scalable commodity trading businesses.
Obtain the most appropriate and useful data for your specific needs! Value Creed offers a range of services to support you during your data transformation journey. With expertise in data integration, reporting, and performance optimization, we assist in ensuring that your data is optimized for analysis, visualization, and validation.
Value Creed offers a full suite of services to provide a comprehensive solution tailored to meet client’s needs and enhance their business processes. With our RightAngle customizations, users could streamline the inventory reporting process with the help of detailed insights into their inventory positions. Our customizations’ real-time reporting capabilities helped manage inventory positions and mitigate any potential risks proactively. This digitally transformational approach resulted in substantial cost savings and time, reduced manual efforts, improved accuracy, and provided timely information. Additionally, the ongoing support from Value Creed ensured the continuous value delivery to the business.
Contact us today to learn more about our digital transformation solutions.
Performance Challenge A prominent downstream company that operates a network of gasoline service stations across the United States faced significant challenges while generating timely business
Performance Challenge A global commodity merchant who trades in a wide variety of financial and physical markets was facing issues with data integration. Resorting to
Performance Challenge Due to manual efforts, a company encountered data analysis challenges that hindered its operations. Generating multiple reports, such as monthly reports for various
Customize & improve business processes with Value Creed’s Implementation Services
In the routine operations of a leading fuel supplier in North America, significant errors and mismatches in Bill of Lading (BOL) numbers posed a notable challenge, affecting operational efficiency. The BOL numbers outline shipment contents and destinations, these details were often compromised due to manual data entry errors made by truck drivers at delivery sites. These discrepancies included mistakes in BOL numbers, vendor details, and other critical information. With the receipt of hundreds of BOLs daily, totaling 10 to 100 mismatches, cash flow experienced a notable impact. Failure to generate invoices due to Bill of Lading discrepancies posed risks to credit limits, trade restrictions, operational disruptions, regulatory compliance, resource allocation, customer satisfaction, and cost management.
To address these issues, daily manual validation became necessary to maintain the accuracy of BOL information. Recognizing this need, Value Creed introduced automation solutions to identify and rectify BOL data discrepancies, ensuring the seamless integration of accurate and up-to-date information into the system. Through the implementation of automation, businesses could effectively reduce errors, minimize delays in invoice generation, and uphold smooth operations within fuel transportation logistics.
Automated analysis processes boosted operational efficiency by 75%
Achieved 95%+ Data accuracy on BOL data
60-70% reduction in resource utilization for manual tasks
90% accuracy in destination code management
Decrease in invoicing cycle time by 80%
Our suggested solution is a comprehensive workflow implemented through Power Automate, designed to significantly enhance operational efficiency by optimizing manual processes.
Data Integration and Visualization: Implemented a unified platform to integrate data from various sources such as RightAngle, and other applications to fetch information from various parameters.
Automated Validation and Matching: Developed automated algorithms to validate BOL numbers and other parameters across different systems to identify correct data. Enabled automated mapping of this data that generated simplified results in the desired format.
Streamlined Reporting: Automated generation of reports and summary tables enabled distribution of data throughout the organization to verify and align the data.
Efficient Database Updates: Integrated automated tools to update Bill of Lading (BOL) data in the RightAngle database seamlessly to ensure timely and accurate updates to prevent errors in fuel delivery logistics
Performance Optimization: Streamlined operations, reducing manual processing time and errors by 70%. Implemented user feedback loop for ongoing enhancements and analytics-driven refinements.
Obtain the most appropriate and useful data for your specific needs! Value Creed offers a range of services to support you during your data transformation journey. With expertise in data integration, reporting, and performance optimization, we assist in ensuring that your data is optimized for analysis, visualization, and validation.
Our solution aims to revolutionize the industry by offering a scalable, user-friendly, and highly efficient platform for managing fuel delivery logistics. The solution covered custom solution development, data integration, workflow optimization, data validation and quality assurance, user training and support, and continuous improvement initiatives.
We tailored a Power Automate workflow for seamless data extraction, validation, analysis, and database updates. The solution drastically reduced manual analysis time from 8 hours to 2 hours daily, preventing breaches of credit exposure limits due to Bill of Lading data mismatches. It streamlined operations, minimized errors, and reallocated resources efficiently. Automation and validation mechanisms ensured data accuracy and compliance with fuel tax regulations, mitigating risks of incorrect tax calculations. By automating data validation and synchronization, our solution expedited invoicing, ensuring accuracy, and reducing manual analysis time, ultimately enhancing efficiency.
Contact us today to learn more about our digital transformation solutions.
Performance Challenge A prominent downstream company that operates a network of gasoline service stations across the United States faced significant challenges while generating timely business
Performance Challenge Due to manual efforts, a company encountered data analysis challenges that hindered its operations. Generating multiple reports, such as monthly reports for various
Performance Challenge One of North America’s most prominent oil and gas utility companies aimed to upgrade their CTRM to better serve their customers in a
Customize & improve business processes with Value Creed’s Implementation Services
KEEPING PACE WITH DYNAMIC COMMODITY MARKET DEMANDS
Change is the only constant for commodity trading enterprises and the businesses that support them. Companies must evolve and optimize in order to thrive. To succeed, energy- and commodity-related organizations must constantly adapt – shifting strategies, acquiring and divesting, vertically and horizontally integrating, maturing business processes, streamlining workflow, and scaling activities to remain competitive.
Within this dynamic landscape, CBOL™ serves as a guiding framework that enables us to evaluate each company’s position in its journey and gain valuable insights into their operations, empowering us to implement strategic adjustments to our approach, informed by this understanding. By using the CBOL™ framework, we ensure that we adapt and optimize your business processes effectively, staying competitive and aligned with the evolving goals throughout the entire commodity trading journey.
Relying on disparate business processes can put you at a disadvantage as competitors adopt more sophisticated technologies and streamlined operations. Commodities industry players must redesign and optimize their processes to address a variety of issues:
Ensuring consistency, compliance, efficiency, accountability, risk mitigation, and overall improvement in business processes
Automating, and securing data functions to reduce errors and vulnerability |
Mapping structural and task dependencies to mitigate waste |
Real-time reporting and full disclosure of positions, inventory, forecasts, assets, etc. |
MATCHING BUSINESS PROCESS DESIGN TO ORGANIZATIONAL STRATEGY
Value Creed leverages its profound technical and functional expertise to enhance your business processes. After gaining a comprehensive understanding of your company and meticulously analyzing your operations, we employ an inventory of process flows based on industry prevailing practices. With this invaluable insight and our industry-centric process inventory, we tailor our services to perfection.
Our approach is centered around a set of best practices that are aligned with our insights into the relationships among front, middle, and back office functions. Utilizing these insights, we identify which processes have the highest impact on your business and skillfully adjust the industry prevailing processes to align them with your future state vision, ensuring a seamless and efficient transformation.
Partnering with Value Creed to perform your business process design and optimization tasks gives you a structured approach to current state performance and future state competitive advantage. Tailoring operational flow to your niche will continue to deliver efficiency and profitability dividends over the long term.
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Several attributes make trade capture a particularly good fit for robotic process automation (RPA). These include:
RPA can perform trade capture tasks more quickly than is humanly possible, making results available for reporting and decision-making on the fly. In addition, robots never make calculation or data-entry errors.
Without employing RPA the trade capture process requires traders to perform several manual activities and encompasses many moving parts. Any of these can cause breakdowns and bottlenecks, robbing commodities trading organizations of productivity:
RPA streamlines the capture of both purchases and sales of physical liquid commodities by triggering their import from the spreadsheet into the corresponding fields in the CTRM platform.
The bot not only enters the provided data but also validates any data missing from the spreadsheet.
A major refined fuel supplier needed a faster and efficient method for scheduling deliveries, removing them from the docket once deliveries were made, and reviewing and entering bills of lading into its CTRM system. The legacy process required more than 50 person-hours every day to input data accurately and confirm that the entered information was accessible. The problem was made more acute because BOLs arrived in a variety of formats, depending on the shipment mode, vendor, and customer, making it difficult for workers to easily and consistently locate the details they needed to enter.
Bots used to compare 100+ different counterparty Bill of Lading formats, parse and enter them in the CTRM
In time spent entering data from shipment tracking into scheduling, actualization, and billing accounts
Large regional fuel refineries and logistics partners often are hindered by the need to retrieve and track information from various vendors, customers, and shippers. RPA streamlines these activities, expediting the flow of data from source to destination and formatting it for use by downstream processes and applications. RPA automates several components of refineries’ ongoing data management requirements:
Value Creed’s RPA generates programmed responses and instant sharing and validation of lease terms, pricing contracts, receipt tickets for fully integrated record-to-report workflow.
Value Creed’s robotic process automation services remove data flow bottlenecks and reduce the amount of human intervention required to accomplish routine, repetitive, no-value-added tasks. The use of this advanced technology streamlines business processes, reduces the risk of data corruption and loss of integrity.
Business Challenge A multi-state U.S. electric cooperative and its subsidiary required more powerful recording and calculation of the financial and physical risk associated with power
Security Challenge A coal producer operating in the United States and Australia needed a conduit for integrating on-premises CTRM, ERP, and risk interface infrastructure with
Improved Go-to-Market Strategies through Full Transparency An integrated biofuel and natural gas company sought Value Creed’s help in solving several reporting issues so it could
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Slow data and manual processes obscure the data your natural gas enterprise needs to maximize revenues and optimize strategy. Time your traders and schedulers spend entering, transferring, and massaging data is time they cannot devote to locking in profits, mitigating risks, and generating insights. These business processes cause distinct time wasters native to your business. Here are three common examples.
This makes it difficult to locate the data that answers key business questions.
Value Creed applies their specialized CTRM expertise to translate these and other business process bottlenecks into accelerated workflows by leveraging robotic process automation. This approach allows your business to continue without disruption and increase productivity by taking manual, human-centric processes and streamlining them by using “bots” to perform defined, repetitive tasks.
Value Creed’s robotic process automation services streamline business processes, alleviate major data entry bottlenecks, and reduce the time humans spend on low-level, repetitive tasks.
You know RPA is not a new concept, it is just now truly useful to CTRM/ETRM business leaders and IT teams. The use of this advanced technology helps by expediting complex CTRM business processes, while relieving associated data integrity risks.
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