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About PAPCO Oil
 PAPCO Oil is a strong and growing business that has been focused
on offering customers outstanding service since its inception in 1976.
Based in Virginia Beach, Virginia, PAPCO markets fuels and lubricants to
a broad customer base in its home state as well as in neighboring North
Carolina.
PAPCO’s primary focus is the supply and distribution of gasoline,
diesel, and heating fuels to customers including federal, state and city
entities, as well as transportation companies including trucking, transit,
railroad and marine. The company currently supplies in excess of 200 million
gallons of product annually, with distribution facilities in Virginia Beach,
Newport News and West Point, Virginia.
Over the years, PAPCO has expanded and diversified its product lines to
include retail gasoline, convenience stores, lubricants, commercial fleet
fuel management, heating and cooling, energy management and branded gasoline
supply programs. Recently, the company added biodiesel fuel to its line.
On the marketing and communications side, PAPCO saw the growth of the World
Wide Web as a means for introducing innovative ways to share its values
with customers.
“
Our decision to develop our Web site was completely customer-driven,” notes
Pat Wilkie, PAPCO’s IT manager. “We look at our Web site
and our customer portal as the means to improve our relationship with
PAPCO
customers and better serve their needs. Offering detailed reports on
their account status, billing and order history that could be delivered
over
the Web is very important to our customers.”
The Challenge
With PAPCO’s increased reliance on the Web arose the need to develop
Web-based reports. However, this had to be done with an eye towards efficiency. “We
are an oil company, but we are not a giant organization with unlimited
resources. We have a five-person IT team that needs to get a lot of work
done on a limited budget. This is why the cost of a reporting solution
chosen to meet this need was a key consideration for us,” adds Wilkie.
The task of developing Web-based reports was the job of James Walters,
IT project manager at PAPCO. “Our company has a core database that
runs in conjunction with a specialized ERP package for the fuels industry.
So, our basic application needs were well covered. The system has always
run very efficiently, but the real challenge was to leverage the information
generated in these systems so that customers and our sales and service
teams could put the information to good use,” notes Walters.
The Solution
”The Logi solutions helped us bridge a gap in our resources: on
one hand, we had the Web, which is intuitive and user-friendly; but on
the other, there was a rich but essentially inaccessible data source. Now,
however, we are able to build reports designed for the Web that easily
integrate with our database. We are also able to use the Logi Studio to
design new reports and to easily update existing ones.”
”
Of course, we value the privacy of our customers, so the ability to define
role- and record-level access to reports in the Logi product was an asset.
In addition to customers, we have been able to provide our sales and service
teams with Web-based reports that help them anticipate customer needs.
In fact, we recently added several reports for our team to access from
their BlackBerry phones, so they have the freedom to view data even while
traveling.”
The Results
”The response from customers to this system has been universally
positive,” adds Walters. “The objective measures like Web hits
and time spent on our site have increased dramatically with the current
version of the PAPCO Internet site. We solicit participation from our customers
and will be incorporating customer contribution into the next phase of
our business intelligence implementation.”
”
The bottom line is that LogiXML provided an outstanding report development
environment. Our team has been able to use it to meet and exceed our objective
today; and we view it as a strong platform for meeting our customer demand
and company objectives for the next phase,” concludes Wilkie.
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