TouchPC Helps Calor Fix Their Leaky Gas Delivery Process
Sometimes, TouchStar’s reputation makes our marketing strategies seem almost pointless. A case in point: Calor, the UK’s leading LPG supplier, and their desire to streamline their bulk delivery operations.Like all businesses, they are constantly looking for ways to cut out waste and increase profitability, and in their delivery side they saw a process leakier than would ever be tolerated in their products. A mountain of paperwork, lost records, uneven stock reconciliation, lengthy billing cycles, duplication of efforts and broadly inefficient use of drivers’ time led them to the conclusion that a modern, competitive solution was required.
TouchStar were the obvious choice. “Because of its expertise and knowledge of the fuel and gas business and its reputation for robust systems,” said David Brown, Calor’s Fleet Asset Manager, “TouchStar is recognised as the best in the Industry.” TouchStar’s recommendation was to put a TouchPC Eagle and TouchPoD in each of Calor’s 180 delivery vehicles and to fully automate delivery logging and back-office data transfer. These two positive actions cut out paperwork, increased accuracy, eliminated human error from the process and put every transaction onto Calor’s database to be called upon whenever a query was raised. On-screen signature capture provided an assured proof of delivery; drivers asked for a receipt simply operate the integrated TouchPoD and run one off there and then, saving time writing out detailed delivery notes or searching for a printer on-site.
Another reason Calor felt utterly confident with their choice was down to the well-known toughness of TouchStar’s TouchPC hardware. The jolts, bumps, grime and bacon fat of the average working lorry cab would have proved too much for hardware at the more delicate end of the spectrum. David saw a rugged, world-resistant exterior as an essential aspect of his solution’s wish-list, and the TouchPC Eagle did not let him down: “The system needed to be able to withstand the harsh conditions inside the cab – often hot and dusty with a lot of vibration, not to mention resilient to all weather conditions.” Implementation was set under way, a process that was assisted greatly by TouchStar’s pre-installation planning and our years of serving the fuel industry. On day one, many of the drivers did not know what had hit them – many of them had been filling forms for decades and saw the technology as complicated and unnecessary. By day two, they were fully signed up members of the IT generation, enthusiastic about the lack of paperwork and able to get on with the job they were trained to do.
TouchStar’s simple and intuitive menu-driven system helps with everything from the day’s planning right down to the individual delivery. Calor continue to use the TouchStar system and it is now ingrained into their processes. Because of our close two-way relationship, we are able to modify the basic system on request to accommodate changes to theirs, as well as to advise them on future steps to take to get the most implementation and results of the solution, David Brown concluded that, “the solution fitted perfectly with our business model and has out of their solution. Reflecting on the reduced overall development time.”Once again, through collaboration and technological expertise, TouchStar have accomplished exactly what we set out to do.
