Lynx Newsletter # 7 (December 14, 2001)
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One of the biggest expenses in any propane plant is the cost of deliveries. In addition to having good drivers, this issue breaks down to two key questions.
1. Do my customers have the right size tank? If a tank is too big, you have money tied up in steel that's not paying for itself with adequate volume. On the other hand, if it's too small, you're incurring additional (and unnecessary) expense by delivering too often. Either way, it's costing you money.
2. Am I making deliveries efficiently? Even if you have the "right" size tanks, you can still lose money making deliveries inefficiently. The result is that any savings in tank cost (by being smaller) is more than offset by the expense of excessive deliveries.
Fortunately, Lynx gives you the information to help you address these questions . . .
Tank Report TR05 . . . "Delivery Frequency Report"
This report will go through all of your tanks and count the number of deliveries for a selected period of time, route, customer set, or other criteria. It will then print a report in "number of deliveries" sequence . . . the tanks with the fewest deliveries first and those with the most deliveries last. The idea is to use this listing to analyze the tanks at each end of the report. That is, tanks with a low number of deliveries indicate the need for a smaller tank. Ones with a higher number indicate the need for a larger tank. Of course, there may well be mitigating circumstances that come into play relative to changing customer tanks, but at least you have
the information to address the problem.
Delivery Report DR02 . . . "Delivery History Report"
This report can be run selectively by route or next delivery date and gives you a statistical measurement of the efficiency of each delivery to the selected stops/tanks. Each delivery has an "Efficiency Rating" calculated for it. This is computed as a percent of 85% of the capacity of each tank. In other words, the higher the number the better it is because that means the tank was low when the delivery was made. On the other hand, the lower the number, the less the amount of fuel delivered relative to the tank size. Use this report to find LOW efficiency numbers so that you can identify and fix the underlying routing or driver problem. Keep in mind that the higher the efficiency numbers, the more money you make.
By the way, these subjects (and more) are addressed in more detail in the Lynx Help System under "Tips for the Manager".