Strong focus on ROI secures Opet deal for Ortec

Following an extensive return on investment analysis, Opet, a leading player in the petroleum and oil industry and part of Koc Holding, has selected Ortec to automate its lubricant distribution planning. Speaking about the selection, Murat Inci, Project Manager at Opet, explains: "From a group of several specialist suppliers, Ortec outshone all the competition by clearly demonstrating the necessary capabilities to handle all of our planning constraints. The deciding factor, however, was the fact that Ortec could deliver large reductions in transportation costs, by an estimated 5% compared with the previous year, which would equate to significant financial savings for our company. We expect the ROI time for this project to be approximately one year."

Opet is currently in the analysis phase of a project to implement Ortec's advanced vehicle routing and optimisation solution, Ortec Shortrec, at its central distribution warehouse in Izmir, western Turkey. This deployment will be closely followed in the new year by the implementation of Ortec Orion, Ortec 's powerful demand forecasting solution. Opet will use Ortec Shortrec to create optimised route plans for the third party transportation companies tasked with distributing Opet 's bottled oil products to 2500 shipping points across the region. On a daily basis, Opet 's planners schedule approximately 50 orders to customers in the automotive and industrial sectors.

Enhanced reporting capabilities
At present, customer orders are processed in SAP and the data is manually exported to MS Excel in order to create the distribution plans. Mr. Inci describes some of the additional benefits of switching to an automated process: "Besides the financial gains already mentioned, we also expect to reduce the time it takes to create the plans so that our planners can concentrate on other important tasks. In addition, we will gain significantly enhanced reporting capabilities, enabling us to analyse the transportation costs more effectively and view instant management reports. The seamless integration with SAP will allow us to determine the real transportation costs and this aspect will save us a great deal of time and effort."

Constraint-based planning
Opet's planners encounter numerous planning constraints and challenges during daily operations. As Mr. Inci explains, "One of our main constraints is dealing with customer credit limits in the event that an order value exceeds the agreed limit on a customer account. Furthermore, if stock levels are insufficient for current order volumes, the planners must plan the orders based on customer prioritisation. Our planners also have to take into account required vehicle capacity and type, i.e. FTL (full truck load), LTL (less than full truck load), cargo etc. This is an immense amount of data to process in a manual process, which is why we opted for an automated solution such as Ortec Shortrec."

In order to select the optimal solution for its business, Opet launched a competitive tender process wherein 6 companies competed to secure the deal. Describing the reason for selecting Ortec 's solutions, Mr. Inci states: "Besides their flexibility and seamless integration with SAP, Ortec's products can be implemented immediately, without the need for extensive customisation. Ortec has a proven track record in the industry, with excellent customer references, and Arelik, another company within our group, is already successfully working with Ortec 's applications. What's more, Ortec not only meets all of our current requirements, but with their suite of innovative products, they are ideally placed to serve our future needs too."