Improving Asset Utilization With a Tank Management System
By SkyBitz • Published December 28, 2017 • 4 minute read
If you knew that you were driving up delivery costs unnecessarily, wouldn’t you want to take action immediately? Over-servicing your tanks could be seriously impacting your margins. Logistics optimization techniques like efficiency reporting can help you manage critical tank data by efficiently servicing all your tanks, which helps maximize your profits.
Optimizing Fill Efficiency With a Tank Management System
Efficiency is a measure of how empty a tank is when you refill it. For example, filling a tank that is only missing a third of its capacity would result in only 33% efficiency. The optimal efficiency is 80%, and the industry standard goal is 75%.
Many distribution companies are simply guessing how often tanks need to be serviced. Because of this, you might be topping off your customers’ tanks or not filling their tanks soon enough. This practice leads to over-servicing or a demand for delivery emergencies, which waste your company’s time and money.
In contrast, using a tank management system like SmartTank monitoring can help you anticipate fill efficiency so you can dispatch the exact amount of product needed to fill your tanks at the right time. That way, you can wait to service the tanks until they are at the 80% efficiency goal while still being productive with your drivers and trucks. When your fleet’s refill efficiency is high, you are delivering the maximum amount of product for the same amount of revenue but with fewer trips.
In short, tank monitoring helps you maximize your profits by reducing deliveries and increasing the amount of product delivered. The SmartTank portal makes it easy for dispatchers and distributors to determine efficiency and utilize assets.
Benefits of Using Tank Logistics Optimization Techniques
Using a logistics optimization technique like SmartTank efficiency reporting can help you:
- Filter and view which subsets of tanks need to be serviced based on your company’s own efficiency goals.
- Check to see if SmartTank’s predictive analytics has identified other tanks that are close to efficiency targets that can be dispatched at the same time.
- Sort by days to alarm and see in advance if a user has additional tanks that need to be filled in the near future. If so, you can add those to the day’s route plan.
- Run efficiency reports to ensure you are saving as much money as possible once you’re servicing tanks on the right schedule.
By specifying the average delivery cost and your target efficiency, SmartTank shows the efficiency data for the selected time frame. In the report, you can look at target deliveries, which are the number of deliveries that SmartTank estimates you’ll need to meet your efficiency goal. You can also compare that number with the actual number of deliveries made based on SmartTank’s fill detection feature.
Stop Over-Servicing Tanks and Start Improving Asset Utilization
SmartTank allows you to see how much money you should be spending in target costs vs. how much you are spending in actual costs. This lets you know if you’re on track for your efficiency goals. If not, you can start making changes so you won’t continue to lose money.
SmartTank tank monitoring can help you avoid over-servicing tanks. Contact SkyBitz to learn more about how you can start saving money with SmartTank.
