Spectre Provides 96% Improvement
in Report Processing Time
Quick facts
Organization: Corrib Oil
Industry: Fuel and Retail
Location: Ireland
Employees: 500+
Turnover: €210 million
Customer since: 2011
Website: www.corriboil.com
Solution: Diver Platform
Key takeaways
- Diver allows Corrib Oil to bring all of its data together from multiple shops and systems in one place.
- Corrib Oil uses Diver to produce specifically tailored automatic reports to help it meet Ireland’s monthly revenue compliance regulations.
- Upgrading to the latest version of Diver Platform increased the speed of Corrib Oil’s reports by 96%.
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, and Corrib Retail, which is a premier operator of 18 upscale convenience stores and service stations.
Corrib Oil’s sites are typically in the top three grocery outlets in their local markets. The company provides upscale convenience offerings to customers, including fresh deli items, Insomnia coffee, fresh bakery items, everyday groceries, and wine and spirits. Corrib Oil has more than 115,000 customers participating in its rewards program.
The challenge
Corrib Oil has just two sides to its business, with oil distribution and retail, but each of those sides has many components that comprise them. And almost all of those components have their own technology in place. For instance, on the oil distribution side, there are separate systems for fleet management, truck loading, fuel stock level monitoring, and the fuel card system. On the retail side, there are systems for the company’s loyalty program, fuel stock level for the fuel stations, hygiene safety, and products sold. In addition, each of Corrib Oil’s shops was on a separate server, and none of them were interconnected.
In order to report on the state of its business each week, Corrib Oil previously printed out reports from each system and compiled everything manually into an Excel spreadsheet on Monday morning. This process was incredibly time-consuming and error-prone.
“The KPI owners get new ideas, so you find that the set of dashboards is a living thing that you need to readjust. Thankfully, Diver is not just robust, but flexible as well, so the visuals can be adjusted easily.”
The goal
Corrib Oil decided to implement business intelligence in order to:
- Bring all of its information from its separate shops and systems together so it could easily report on the state of its business as a whole.
- Avoid the process of manually inputting information into an Excel spreadsheet.
- Speed up the process of reporting.
What’s next
Corrib Oil currently uses Diver to bring together its clocking system and its payroll system so the company can compare what’s being clocked against what’s being paid. The company then compares that against sales and produces sales per hour spent and cost per hour spent reports. The company can also use the information to determine what times are busiest at which sites. However, what Corrib Oil hasn’t done yet is tie all that information together to figure out staffing for its various sites. The company is considering bringing all that information together in another way so it can figure out when a certain site is busiest and whether it needs to adjust staffing to cover the busy times at that spot.
The solution
Diver Platform provided Corrib Oil with exactly what it needed to manage all of its data. Corrib Oil purchased Diver through Dynamic Business Informatics (DBI), a Dimensional Insight reseller based in Ireland. The company recently upgraded to Spectre, Diver’s latest technology based on columnar databases. Spectre has allowed Corrib Oil to see an increase in the speed with which Diver can process its reports.
The results
Diver allowed Corrib Oil to bring together all of its data into one system for uniform reporting. Diver allows Corrib Oil to access all of its information at once rather than forcing the company to pull data out of each separate system. For Corrib Oil, this has provided the ability to not only produce more reports, but also to produce reports that are more in-depth. Users can drill down to specific products at specific sites to see what is selling and where.
For example, Avril Garvey, accountant at Corrib Oil, says that in one case, the reports showed that coffee was selling at a particular rate at all of Corrib Oil’s shops except for one. Once the company’s managers investigated further, they found that the coffee machine in that one shop was not in the correct location, and thus, was not selling as much product.
In addition, Corrib Oil has certain revenue compliance regulations it needs to meet in order to stay in business. The company was able to use Diver to set up a report that met the specific requirements of the revenue format that is automatically updated every month. This involves thousands of sales invoices, and it would be impossible to produce this report on time manually.
More recently, Corrib Oil upgraded to Diver Platform’s Spectre technology. As a result, the company has seen a significant increase in the speed with which its reports are produced. Before the upgrade, Corrib Oil had so much information that it was processing overnight that it wouldn’t finish until after 11:00 in the morning. Now it is able to process within the overnight window, doing what used to take five and a half hours in just 12 minutes, so that all of the data is ready by the start of the business day. That equates to a 96% improvement in processing time.
What’s next
Corrib Oil currently uses Diver to bring together its clocking system and its payroll system so the company can compare what’s being clocked against what’s being paid. The company then compares that against sales and produces sales per hour spent and cost per hour spent reports. The company can also use the information to determine what times are busiest at which sites. However, what Corrib Oil hasn’t done yet is tie all that information together to figure out staffing for its various sites. The company is considering bringing all that information together in another way so it can figure out when a certain site is busiest and whether it needs to adjust staffing to cover the busy times at that spot.