The ground support industry's source for news, articles, events, product and services information.
Issue link: https://groundsupportworldwide.epubxp.com/i/618927
14 GROUND SUPPORT WORLDWIDE DECEMBER 2015 / JANUARY 2016 FUEL SUPPLY other problems with this approach. "Your ability to interrogate, analyze and effectively use the data is also very limited because it's in different places," he says. "Plus, generic ERP systems weren't designed with the aviation fuel supply market in mind and suppliers often tell us that as a result, these systems aren't a good ft with business processes." These revelations are worrying for the industry, because clearly, being able to main- tain a single up-to-date list of fuel prices is absolutely crucial to the fuel supply business. HEADACHE 2: Creating a transparent pricing policy Another closely linked challenge is appar- ently that many of the aviation fuel sup- pliers and resellers FuelPlus talked to are struggling to create a pricing policy that can be understood and applied by different members of staff. Due to the complexity of pricing, which could include different mark- ups based on location or fuel volume, as well as the frequency with which price compo- nents change, pricing decisions are mainly being taken by the fuel desk manager. This can slow down the process of quoting and responding to fuel requests and, arguably, isn't the best use of resources. HEADACHE 3: Monitoring the credit limits of airlines Another key issue, according to FuelPlus, is that suppliers and resellers need the ability to accurately monitor the credit limits of their airline customers. The main headache here is about keeping credit limits suffcient- ly up-to-date, bearing in mind the number of refuelling events that could be taking place each day, and the number of fuel tickets this would generate. Again, the norm seems to be that fuel suppliers and resellers manually maintain this information in Excel fles, so the risk of human error and out-of-date information is high, says FuelPlus representatives. This could potentially leave fuel suppliers and resellers fnancially vulnerable. "Flightworx Fuel works closely with Flightworx Accounts to monitor credit limits and ensure that there is constant communi- cation with our clients in order to keep things moving," James Kossick, Fuel Manager for the fuel reseller Flightworx Aviation, says of his company's process. Kossick admits that this is "largely a human task which is performed on a daily basis, and we rely on the suppliers invoices to be correct." The reseller's dependency on information from fuel suppliers is explained further in headache 5. HEADACHE 4: Operating a slick and effcient fuel request process In order to supply fuel to a customer at an airport, numerous steps must be taken, appropriate checks made and data from various sources needs to be tied together. For example, when a fuel supplier or reseller receives a fuel request from a customer, they need to check credit, send out authorization to the airport, issue fuel codes, a correspond- ing fuel order, and so on. As Flightworx Avi- ation's James Kossick summarises: "There is a large amount of human infuence on any fuel release." For most of the fuel suppliers and resellers that FuelPlus talked to, this means manually checking several spreadsheets and copying and pasting information between docu- ments. FuelPlus see this as another waste of skilled resources and one that leaves sup- pliers at risk of human error. HEADACHE 5: Capturing fuel ticket information quickly During their research, FuelPlus also discov - ered that for aviation fuel resellers in par- ticular, confrmation of the actual amount of fuel uplifted at each fuelling takes a long time to come through. Tiberiu elaborates: "While fuel tickets are issued to the pilot, airline and fuel suppli- er, they aren't given to the resellers. This means that fuel resellers usually have to wait for the suppliers to send an invoice before they know the actual volume sold, and this can create cashfow problems." He added: "This also means that fuel resellers have to trust fuel suppliers to invoice for the correct amount." Fuel suppliers are clearly at an advantage here, but even for them, say FuelPlus, there are ineffciencies. They are faced with the laborious and slow process of gathering and checking hundreds of (often) paper-based fuel tickets and then raising invoices for these. The drive for automation It's perhaps surprising to many, that in the 21 st Century, much of the work of fuel suppliers and resellers is still manual and resource-intensive. But this is a familiar story for FuelPlus as their CEO, Klaus-Pe- ter Warnke explains: "About 5-10 years ago we saw the same reliance on paper-based, manual processes for invoicing within the industry. It created a lot of ineffciency and as a result, IATA started the initiative to create a standardized electronic (XML) fuel invoice for all parties to use. FuelPlus was part of the taskforce for this initiative and within 5 years, we've seen the sector switch from a very manual approach to invoicing to a very automated approach." Klaus-Peter is confdent that the same transformation can take place within the fuel supply industry for other accounting and procurement activities, so that the diffculties experienced by suppliers and resellers today, will become a thing of the past. In fact, automating the industry is his central mission: "I believe that ultimate business effciency can only be achieved through the automation of processes," he explains. "So the FuelPlus vision is to come up with tools that can free fuel profession- als of their boring routine activities, so they have more time to spend on areas where they can really add value, such as talking It's perhaps surprising to many that, in the 21st Century, much of the work of fuel suppliers and resellers is still manual and resource-intensive .