Optimizing Operations to Maintain a Culture of Safety
Optimizing Operations is a big part of how we maintain a culture of Safety at Dennis K Burke. That entails all sorts of things, from the obvious items like making sure trucks and drivers have proper permitting, licensing and hazmat, all the way out through the far less obvious things like upgrading tablets and servers in the office so drivers can work more effectively. Our Operations team includes Safety, Dispatch, Lube Ops, and Fuel Ops teams working together with drivers, Customer Service, finance and IT to always focus on the upgrades and process changes we think will have the maximum benefit for our customers, employees, and of course, enhance our drivers' ability to make safe deliveries. Upgrades we've made in the past few years that have made a major impact include:
- GPS Monitoring on Trucks. This enables real time route tracking and allows dispatch to adjust upcoming loads as needed without interrupting drivers
- Custom Dispatch program. This allows visibility into details of customer sites, and feeds delivery information and scheduling to driver tablets
- Barcode scanner systems for fueling. These slow detailed gallon reporting info on all tanks filled in addition to touch fueling.
- Barcode systems for lubricant products
- Electronic dispatching to driver tablets - eliminates phone calls and status updates, and allows easy tracking of products on the customer side
These are just a few examples that we think highlight some of the process improvements we've made to establish a working environment for our drivers that is as safe and efficient as possible. We believe that it is important to focus on making the day-to-day job of fuel transport drivers as painless as possible, and a substantial part of making that happen relies on the operations team, as well as the technology updates we implement.
We went into more detail about the process updates we made and how we see them making an impact for this months issue of Oil & Energy Magazine. You can read that in full here: Optimizing Operations: Best Practices for terminal and fuel transport operators
