SkyBitz Tank Monitoring Streamlines Dispatch Operations for S.A. White Oil Company

“Customers love not having to worry about their fuel.”

Customer service is at the heart of tank monitoring implementation for Georgia-based S.A. White Oil Company

Since 1926, S.A. White Oil Company based out of Marietta, Georgia has built a reputation in the petroleum distribution business primarily on personalized customer attention and good old-fashioned friendship. Today, as a female-owned and operated business, they pride themselves on these values, and have built a culture focused on quality customer service, efficient work processes, and constant improvement through investments in their people and technology.

Many of the company’s drivers have been working for S.A. White Oil for 10 to 25 years, resulting in direct customer interaction, such as daily phone calls to ensure customer deliveries are made in a timely and expedited manner. With over 1,000 customers and over half of the tanks they own being monitored by SkyBitz tank monitoring technology, the convergence of digital tools and tried and true customer service remains at the forefront of their success.

It is imperative for the team at S.A. White Oil to understand their customers’ business, as this has played a monumental role in how they have grown their operation over the years. With many of their fuel deliveries concentrated in the construction industry, it is essential for the team to understand variations in demand on a daily basis. Weather and the economy are constantly disrupting the distribution schedule across the state, and that requires constant attention from the S.A. White dispatch and management team.

For instance, one of their customers is working on a massive construction project with the Department of Transportation. When the project is moving forward at full throttle, the equipment usage varies. On some days, the equipment is being utilized 24 hours a day, while on other days, the equipment is only used for 12 hours. If you factor in weather conditions, such as rain which is frequent in the South, the entire project comes to a screeching halt from one week to the next. This can significantly reduce the need for refueling at the customer site that week, requiring daily visibility and management to avoid overruns.

Circumstances such as these impact S.A. White’s distribution schedule and must be taken into account on a daily basis in order for them to run an efficient operation. The economy also plays a huge role, as distribution schedules change drastically when there is a shift in rack rates, and customers look for ways to take advantage of declining fuel prices. Asset depreciation and labor costs can also eat into profits when fluctuations with the economy and customer demands are constantly changing.

On the flip side, as companies look to improve productivity and cut costs across their own operation, they also recognize the risks when transferring manual processes into digital ones from a customer perspective. While overruns may seem counterproductive, S.A White Oil Company makes every effort to perform efficiency checks so their customers never run out of fuel, which is the biggest mistake that can be made in this industry. Transitioning to digital processes must be strategically planned across the operation, utilizing best practices and the aegis of their partners for both short-term and long-term gain.

Approximately twenty years ago, S.A. White Oil implemented SkyBitz tank monitoring technology in an effort to locate and keep track of their own tanks, scattered and continuously moving throughout their various customer sites spanning the State of Georgia. What was traditionally a manual process requiring countless hours of employees calling and traveling to remote locations to look for lost tanks, is now as simple as logging into the SkyBitz SMARTank platform and pulling up a dashboard that identifies a tanks’ physical GPS location.

S.A. White Oil now has a much more efficient task of track and fill, eliminating the need to send human bodies half-way across the State, only to realize the tanks were moved. Dispatch knows exactly where the customer has moved the tank, so the next delivery can be efficiently routed.

In addition to sheer location tracking of S.A. White’s tanks, the integration of tank level sensors provides readings of tank capacity for the purpose of automating refueling dispatch schedules through the use of cloud-based technology. Now, both the drivers and the dispatch teams have access to monitored tanks and can service those while in the area using the SkyBitz SMARTank platform.