Diver Application Cuts 95% off Manual Processing Times

Key takeaways

Background

Corrib Oil was founded in Ireland in 1987 and has developed a strong presence in the west of Ireland as well as in the midlands. There are two divisions of Corrib Oil: Corrib Distribution, which is a leading distributor of heating oil and road fuels in Ireland’s west and midlands, with 39 oil depots and more than 100 drivers delivering oil, diesel, and gas from a fleet of 95 trucks; and Corrib Retail, which is a premier operator of 19 upscale convenience stores and service stations.

Corrib Oil’s retail sites are typically in the top three grocery outlets in their local markets. The oil distribution business provides heating oil for domestic and commercial customers, road fuel for individual, commercial, and agricultural users, and lubricants. Corrib Oil has more than 115,000 customers participating in its rewards program and more than 86,000 oil account customers.

The challenge

As we saw in the previous case study about Corrib Oil, there are many components within each side of the organisation, and there are separate systems for most of these components.

The focus for this new application was on automating the mapping of “Proof-of-Delivery” trip data recorded by each driver (as heating oil and other fuel is delivered from trucks to customers’ oil tanks) to the data recorded by the sales order and payment ERP system, entered when a customer interacts with the processing depots.

In order to pay each driver an accurate weekly commission in the payroll, all the data had to be mapped manually, and commission worked out on spreadsheets according to the type of order (cash or credit), number of litres delivered, the number of trips, type, and date of payment. This process was complex and extremely time-consuming, and all had to be completed within a fixed window of a few days before the weekly payroll was due.

In addition, the other payroll components needed to be worked out — holidays, overtime, and supplementary payments. An added complication was that due to human, network, or system error, sometimes trip data did not come through as expected and was hard to chase down.

Another challenge was that sometimes data was duplicated or missing and this needed to be highlighted and corrected.

The goal

Corrib Oil decided to use Diver to build a bespoke application in order to:

The solution

Diver Platform provided Corrib Oil with exactly what it needed to manage the whole process from end-to-end. Working with a consultant from Dynamic Business Informatics (DBI), a Dimensional Insight reseller based in Ireland, Corrib Oil specified its requirements and worked with DBI through the process of creating a complete application. DivePort was chosen to deliver a user-friendly front-end, consisting of a suite of input tables, multiple validation and production routines that could be invoked from a click, plus easy-to-follow reporting that would replace the vast majority of the manual processing that had been required each week.

The results

Diver’s multi-faceted enterprise platform was able to automate the complete process — from collecting and integrating individual proof-of-delivery files, mapping them against ERP data, provide exceptions reporting and creating all the reports and files for payroll, including the drivers’ weekly commission reports as individual PDFs.

The automation of the data mapping not only removed a hugely onerous task from a group of payroll administrators, it also allowed the business rules for commissions to be applied at the critical moment in the week following the last week’s deliveries, allowing several days for payments to be processed and giving more breathing space to the busy data processing and payroll teams.

Tom Spellissy, Corrib Oil’s Finance Director and the driving force behind the project, says, “Before implementing this new Diver application, we devoted hours to getting all the trip data checked against the customer deliveries and payments, and it was always a race against time to ensure that every driver was being rewarded fairly for the previous week’s work. Now we have exceptions reports that do the heavy work for us and we just oversee the results. It’s made a tremendous difference to the speed and accuracy of getting this crucial component into our payroll system.” He reckons it has cut manual processing by 55 man-hours weekly which equates to a 95% reduction in payroll processing time, adding, “The huge time savings allow staff to focus on customer service and value-added jobs in their week.”

What’s next

Tom has asked DBI to expand the payroll application component of the new application to admin staff and another set of drivers who are categorised differently from the 80 or so drivers rewarded in the way described above. Other Diver projects are also ongoing. Examples range from retail basket analysis to phone data analysis, as well as taking data from weather information and customer oil buying patterns to try and forecast demand.

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