COMPANY: Pinnacle Propane
WEBSITE: www.pinnaclepropane.com
INDUSTRY: Wholesale Distribution, Chemicals
COMPANY TYPE: Privately Held
JOHN GALT SOLUTION: Atlas Planning Platform
Company
Pinnacle Propane is a retail propane company that specializes in bulk propane storage and end customer delivery, cylinder filling, and community distribution systems. The diverse company operates out of 13 service centers plus more than 40 fuel depots in the Southern and Central United States serving over 60,0000 customer locations. Pinnacle partnered with John Galt Solutions to improve its demand planning and automate replenishment orders to meet customer requirements while optimizing delivery routes.
Results
- Fully automate daily demand and replenishment planning
- Reduce annual transportation costs by 15%
- ROI of almost 3 to 1 within 2 years of project start
- Increase forecast accuracy by 25%
Challenge
Customers across Pinnacle Propane’s service area rely on timely delivery of propane to drive their businesses, heat the facilities and homes, and so much more. Maintaining an exceptional service level can be very costly both to ensure the right inventory is available when needed as well as the transportation capacity to deliver the propane to customers. The Pinnacle team was unable to utilize the vast amounts of data available to them to drive an accurate forecast and plan delivery routes. Extensive manual processes delayed insights and drove up costs. The team needed a solution to help reduce costs while driving increased service levels.
Transformation Journey
“Atlas Planning Platform helped us automate our demand and replenishment planning and optimize our transportation and distribution needs to meet required customer service levels.”
-Vice President of Supply Chain, Pinnacle Propane
Pinnacle initially partnered with John Galt Solutions to improve its routing process which was highly dependent on accurate demand planning.
“When evaluating the costs of logistics, the tendency is to look at route optimization whilst the true optimization can be found with accurate forecasting and order management ensuring that a customer will be replenished at the right time required,” stated Vice President of Supply Chain, Pinnacle Propane.
Atlas Planning Platform enabled Pinnacle to take a new look at its supply chain and improve customer service levels. By leveraging real-time demand signals such as syndicated weather and IoT sensors data, Atlas is able to optimize Pinnacle’s truck routes to minimize travel distances and delays. The ability to capture and analyze external data, recognize complex patterns, and identify actionable demand signals allows Pinnacle to improve forecast accuracy and scale its operations to support growth.
Using the Atlas Planning Platform, Pinnacle has saved more than $800,000 a year in delivery costs.
Leveraging Machine Learning
Key to accelerating its supply chain is removing manual tasks. Today, Pinnacle Propane leverages Atlas to automate 300 policies covering a wide range of business scenarios from finding data issues to prioritizing customer orders. With Atlas, the company established and monitors KPIs to prioritize and automate orders for more than 60,000 customer locations ensuring safe and timely deliveries.
Pinnacle also utilizes Atlas’ machine learning capabilities to automatically identify bad data. Once identified, the Atlas Planning Platform sends prescriptive recommendations to the team. For example, Atlas may identify missing ERP data, identify incorrect tank delivery quantities, make changes to the routing schedule, and more.
Atlas frees up valuable team members’ time by automating manual tasks and delivering prescriptive outputs when it identifies issues.
Improving Visibility and Accuracy of Store-level Replenishment
Pinnacle Propane brings in telemetry (cellular sensor) inventory data every day. This telemetry data, sent by an IoT sensor placed on top of bulk storage tanks, allows Pinnacle to measure the inventory levels at each customer. Atlas converts the inventory data into daily usage and to re-plan replenishment needs by 5:00 am every day.
This level of automation ensures Pinnacle can confidently manage its more than 60,000 customer locations with a single forecasting and demand planning manager. Atlas collects and optimizes all the planning data, including daily location-level inventory, to rapidly reforecast customer demand before automatically releasing new orders to ensure replenishment trucks arrive at the optimal time.
Establishing a Single Source of Truth for Cross-Functional Productivity
Atlas provides a single source of truth–one unified plan–that helps Pinnacle Propane automatically integrate data and synchronize operations both inside and outside of the business to suppliers and customers.
“Historically, most of our information systems have been siloed, but Atlas has done a tremendous job bringing all functional data together into one application which has improved planning accuracy and cross-functional productivity.”
-Stephen Little, Forecasting & Demand Planning Manager, Pinnacle Propane
The Atlas Planning Platform enabled Pinnacle to transform its supply chain network, allowing the business to accelerate, automate, and align plans driving faster decision making, improved service levels, and reduced costs.
Pinnacle’s enhanced planning capability has allowed it to create multi-week driver forecast which leverage Atlas’ ability to harmonize near-term and mid-term seasonality and demand. The driver forecast ensures near-term routing optimization is executed by synchronizing the demand planning, delivery planning, and driver forecast processes instead of as separate groups with separate data, assumptions and tools.
