• Founded in 1983
• SAP Partner for 20 years
• Headquartered in Hamburg, Germany with subsidiaries in North America, Europe and Asia
• Optimizes logistics and business processes for oil and gas downstream companies
• Neptune Software Bronze Partner

Making sure fuels, gas and heating oil is delivered to customers on time is surprisingly complex. To keep the supply flowing freely, the secondary distribution market requires:

• Efficient and effective fuel inventory management
• The ability to collaborate and integrate with a range of businesses, from sophisticated large distributors with their own ERP solutions to service stations and even the truck drivers themselves.
• Efficient networking with suppliers, haulers and tax authorities
• An up-to-date overview of the current financial status at any time, among other needs

Making downstream gas distribution more efficient is something Implico has excelled at for more than 20 years as an SAP partner. A software and consulting implementation provider, Implico’s automated volume and accounting software for fuel movement, called SAP Supply Chain for Secondary Distribution, has been part of SAP’s price list offerings since 2003, helping the industry streamline logistics, purchase, production of bulk fuel products at a terminal or refinery, distribution to the retail sector, and more.

“Having immediate, up-to-date access to information is really important to drive efficiency in the oil and gas supply chain,” says Mike Serratore, Vice President and General Manager at Implico.

So when a large U.S. retailer sought to move its distribution capabilities to a more real-time, mobile environment using SAP S/4HANA and HTML UI5, Implico was an obvious choice as a delivery partner. Time was of the essence, since the retailer’s decision to move away from its previous distribution system to SAP came with a hard deadline.

The challenge for the customer: To build an end-to-end distribution solution to manage fuel delivery efficiently and securely to over 600 gas stations across the United States. The company needed a solution to enable collaboration with large and small suppliers right down to the truck drivers who needed to deliver the gas and confirm order completion.

There were several critical solution considerations for the retailer, which included the need to:

• Be built fast. There was a clear cut-over date from their old solution to SAP.
• Provide access to a large ecosystem of partners who were not within the retailer’s network in a secure and highly scalable manner.
• Support a de-coupled architecture to ensure there was no single point of failure.
• Integrate data from the suppliers, the SAP ERP solution, and integrated IoT fuel-level gauges and combine this data in a highly visual way to provide actionable insights to the retailer.
• Develop user interfaces that were tailored to the user–from highly sophisticated management dashboards to very simple mobile apps which Truck drivers could use.

Implico was already a Neptune Software Partner and had used Neptune’s DXP SAP Edition to create customized dashboards and user experiences for their standard oil and gas secondary distribution solution which is sold on SAP’s pricelist. Having evaluated Neptune’s DXP Open Edition, an agnostic API-powered tool and the unique strength of the integration between both, they felt confident that this solution could meet all the retailer’s requirements.

Within six months Implico was able to build the solution end to end. Within it there is a seamless interaction from the retailer’s fuel headquarters right through the supply chain to the fuel station managers who can confirm receipt of delivery on a mobile app or the truck driver who picks up their delivery schedule from the mobile app and confirms delivery to the distributors who can confirm delivery directly interacting with the retailer’s ERP.

“Our customers needed an economic way to approach managing exceptions in their system, the items that required further processing, such as cancellations, rebookings, intercompany matching and reconciling transactions. There was no out-of-the-box SAP solution that provided that,” says Mike. “And the Neptune DX Platform, with its development dashboard and workbench was a clear choice to help us develop our new apps on a rapid timeline.”

With the help of Neptune Software’s app development platform, Implico can design, build, integrate, deploy and maintain apps in a fraction of the time it takes with other platforms—accelerating the delivery of its oil and gas distribution apps for its customers. The custom dashboard is flexible and easily tailored so customers can create different views based on their unique needs, whether for wholesale diesel businesses or retail gas business.

“With Neptune Software, we were able to deliver a customized dashboard view that created a window into their SAP system. With it, users could see all the activity in their business—across area, terminals, geography, products, carriers, you name it.”

Implico has extended its solution capabilities even further, providing an API-first approach to development and integration while delivering apps that make it easy to work with pricing, service station inventory, readings, carrier communications, and other solutions.

“Where customers used to focus on manual activities and spreadsheets, they can instead focus on making sure that supportive data and objects they need in the system are in place to keep automation processing in their system, a big improvement,” says Mike. “Plus, it’s very secure, with just one pipeline-interface from Neptune DXP into the SAP system.”

Using Implico’s CTI Cloud can help drive key improvements across secondary oil and gas distribution operations. Not only can customers automate and standardize the delivery forecast and supply as well as service station processes across the network, they can also speed and improve billing and payment card handling and settlements, too.

With increased transparency and access to SAP and other data — all in a single easy to read dashboard that can be accessed from wherever they’re working — teams can make more informed decisions, and track and resolve exceptions faster so deliveries and refills can be more accurate and efficient. That’s the kind of change that improves customer satisfaction, too. With the system operating smoothly, Implico’s customers are just getting started and are looking to continue to expand functionality.

‘What Implico has built for the oil and gas distribution market with our solution is phenomenal,” says Andreas Grydeland Sulejewski, CEO at Neptune Software. “We see this solution as being of interest to any organization interested in better managing a disparate supply chain in order to deliver an end-to-end service.”