Being PROACTIVE and optimizing for efficiency while avoiding a situation where a customer runs out of fuel (i.e. a ‘run-out’) is one of the biggest concerns facing petroleum marketers. It's tempting to send a truck out immediately to avoid a run-out because a run-out means a lost customer. 

It's also incredibly expensive and highly inefficient to fix - you need to reroute trucks (usually after hours) and send a big, highly inefficient load to fix the problem. Remote tank monitoring services only fuel this paranoia (pun intended), pushing petroleum marketers into the ‘ambulance business’ of reacting to alarms instead of planning when to send a truck out.

My goal for 2022 is to get petroleum marketers out of the reactive ambulance business and to focus them thinking about when it's most profitable to send a truck out (while of course avoiding run-outs). 

In my experience, the best place to start is by looking at what processes you have in place to identify LEADING INDICATORS of potential run-outs. For example, Datanova’s software has a customer relationship module that centralizes every interaction that a petroleum market has with their customer. Most red flags (including run-outs) will be raised by the system itself, allowing you to see what’s outstanding with your customer right away. Many clients we’ve worked with are now using our industry best-practices and have a record of zero run-outs. It is not a surprise, we’ve built the Datanova platform on strong workflows refined by industry leaders over 40+ years