American Oil and Gas Reporter - January 2022 - 59

Barriers To Efficiency
Only a few years ago, managing the
physical and accounting movement of
oil field commodities was entirely paperbased.
Yet supporting NGL and propane
transportation operations today demands
digital systems and software to manage
the back office, track carrier rates and inventory,
coordinate dispatch fleetwide
and manage transactions at scale. The
traditional digital infrastructure for managing
a trucking fleet can be cost-prohibitive
and still require full-time employees
and general and administrative
attention, and it provides only a limited
and static view of where a commodity is
in the supply chain.
Paper persists in the digital oil field.
Drivers still receive and sign a paper bill
of lading, which frequently is stuffed in
the door of the cab. After days on the
road, important paperwork eventually
makes its way back to an office, where
data is keyed in manually. It can take
days before a shipper knows if a load has
been delivered.
Manual processes also persist. A customer
may place a phone order for two
loads of propane, then wait days for a
status update on where it is and the expected
delivery, or if the driver assigned
to the shipment has even picked it up.
Attempting to keep customers informed
is all too often a running game of phone
tag between dispatch, drivers and the
customer, who often has called back several
times and is frustrated by the lack of
transparency and communication. But
this is par for the course.
Paper invoice processes and manual
workflows also create a situation where
most marketing and transportation
providers struggle with getting paid accurately
and quickly enough to manage
cash flow effectively. In fact, working in
midstream transportation can feel like
the banking business, as service providers
essentially loan money to their buyers,
whose payments are impeded by sluggish
accounts receivable and the pervasive
paper problem.
Landed cost represents all the fees
and charges a service provider incurs
over the course of an NGL transaction,
including carrier fees and demurrage.
Without a clear and current view of landed
cost, service providers have poor spend
visibility and limited understanding of
their margins.
An organization's G&A costs are
most heavily weighted by full-time employees,
and those costs extend from
the back office to the cab. No matter
what is being trucked in and out of the
oil field, driver utilization is the toughest
key performance indicator to understand,
as data silos across electronic logging
devices, dispatch and ERP systems create
barriers to analysis.
A Better Way
The cloud and mobile devices are enabling
midstream service providers to
eliminate paper and manual processes,
make data-driven decisions and operate
in powerful new ways. Smart phones and
tablets that ride shotgun with drivers have
introduced opportunities for moving NGL
and other oil field commodities by truck,
including digital management of field
tickets and bills of lading, real-time GPS
and accelerometers.
Combined with supervisory control
and data acquisition monitoring, these
mobile and cloud-based technologies enable
continuous, real-time communications
with all available transporters, allowing
the back office to choreograph the " big
dance " of oil field transportation and ensure
the fluid movement of trucks and
the disposition of commodities at any
given time. What's more, by automating
communications, shippers can seamlessly
leverage a mix of intermodal transportation
such as rail or pipeline alongside trucking
operations.
The flow of information through SCADA
systems and the real-time communications
unlocked by the cloud and mobile
devices also are enabling predictive inventory-both
long and short-at storage
locations, virtually eliminating costly demurrage
fees for trucking. At the same
time, pipeline and rail car inventory data
can be monitored within a single solution,
all accessible over the Web or through a
mobile app.
In transportation, not everything goes
as planned, underscoring the need for
carriers, dispatchers and suppliers to
collaborate around a wide variety of
data so they can adapt and keep moving.
The cloud is breaking down data silos
by integrating transportation contracts
and commodity price feeds from OPIS
or DTN in context with traffic and
weather data. Having real-time prices
available for origin and destination locations
provides shippers with a clear
view of their options, allowing users
and systems to rapidly respond to supply
chain anomalies and ultimately achieve
higher margins.
Unlocking Operational Excellence
A leading provider of midstream services
owns, operates, acquires and develops
a diversified portfolio of complementary
infrastructure and transportation facilities.
These assets include extensive gathering,
crude storage and processing plants. The
midstream company's trucking operations
move more than 1,000 loads each month,
including NGLs, propane and water.
To optimize its extensive trucking
operations, the service provider's management
team looked for ways to leverage
corporate data more effectively for
strategic and tactical decision-making.
To better analyze driver utilization and
productivity, the company set out to
find a TMS solution that would enable
it to see how many drivers are working
at any given moment, productive or
nonproductive hours of service, and revenue
generation by driver. It also wanted
to better understand operational costs
and capture bills of lading electronically
to automate transactions, accelerate accounts
receivable invoicing and optimize
cash flow.
The service provider is leveraging a
modern TMS to streamline its bulk transportation
for condensate, propane and
water, expediting completion of transactions.
The software-as-a-service solution
provides a complete back office for the
company's trucking fleet operations, including
automated dispatch, inventory
management, intermodal scheduling and
electronic field ticket management.
The solution also provides a rate matrix
for all carriers that enables the
service provider to capture missing fees
and costs. Importantly, the TMS automatically
calculates landed cost based
on any transportation events, allowing
the company to immediately reconcile
and invoice customers while incorporating
disposal fees, demurrage and
third-party hauling time.
Connecting the field to the back-office
application is a mobile app for Apple
and Android devices that continuously
synchronizes driver location, speed and
status with the cloud. Similar to logistics
systems used by UPS and FedEx, it leverJANUARY
2022 59
American Oil and Gas Reporter - January 2022

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