Every day in North America there are over 25,000 truck shipments of LPG, Crude, Condensates, NGL’s, by-products and refined products. Adding rail can easily double that number. Trucks typically leave with 3 paper tickets at the producer. At the midstream processor, they may generate another set of tickets. That processor will generate more tickets for their downstream deliveries, and so on, for every party and delivery all the way to the retailer. The masses of transaction documents are keyed into systems (or Excel), emailed, reviewed and reconciled by hand, questioned, corrected, and finalized.
The challenge is daunting. Companies deploy armies of people just to make sure that the transaction records are correct – or more likely they just accept a level of inaccuracy. Even more impactful is the time: Transaction records are often not finalized until a month after they are generated! How can you effectively plan or even make operational decisions using stale and inaccurate data? Important goals like improving asset utilization, operational excellence, or reducing administrative work and reconciliations, become much more difficult. Many operators are fine with simply keeping the facility and the paperwork going. “Just make sure the trucks are loaded and the tickets are filed.” – A typical operator.
A Digital Control Tower for Hydrocarbon Logistics Operations
Enter Wheelhouse, by VantEdge, a complete solution for hydrocarbon logistics. Ticket records are pulled in into the cloud-based app as they happen, and presented in a standard format. Operators and commercial teams see the volumes flowing across a portfolio of terminals in real time. Counterparties are also able to access transactional data in real time, saving countless hours of back & forth communication, rekeying data, and dealing with errors. Through integrations, these transactions can flow automatically into the operational and accounting systems.
Wheelhouse’s full suite includes capabilities for Online Ordering, Truck Scheduling, Terminal Services, and Rail Services (including loading, gauge tables, fleet tracking, fleet and yard management).
From Terminal Operations on Ageing Technology to a Reimagined Future Process
Founder Glenn Moore felt the industry’s pain while working as a commodity trader and logistics manager at Plains Midstream. Along with co-founder Alex Gierus, formerly VP IT & Innovation at Petrotranz, a pipeline nominations application, they founded VantEdge in 2020. First order of business was acquiring TerminalBOSSTM from Schneider Electric because they realized that the best way to solve this challenge was bottom-up: with an ability to handle the most complex requirements and processes directly at the terminals where custody transfers occur.29dk2902l
This proved to be a great base from which to build the business because major players like Cenovus, Plains, and CNRL have been relying on TerminalBOSS for many years.
Offering Wheelhouse to existing and new clients has led to business growth of over 100% year-over-year for 3 years running. Glenn and the team at VantEdge are convinced they are just getting started. The vision is not only to have over 10-million transactions shared in the cloud, but to improve the efficiency of the entire system with a single platform for planning, scheduling, transacting, reporting, optimizing and sharing data.
To learn more about VantEdge and its Wheelhouse platform, click here.
Story originally published by BOE Report on March 20, 2024. https://boereport.com/2024/03/20/is-the-future-of-truck-rail-and-terminal-logistics-here-vantedge-is-leading-the-charge/