“We like Synerzip because of the obvious cost benefit, but also because of their ability to ramp up faster which helps in speeding the product to market.”
Jason RileyDirector Client Solutions, FuelQuest
The Client
FuelQuest (now known as Insite360), HQ in Houston, Texas, offers on-demand fuel management solutions for suppliers, distributors, and energy commodities buyers. Its Insite360 platform integrates all major suppliers, distributors, terminals, and price feeds in a standard fuel supply chain.
FuelQuest sees significant benefits by automating all aspects of the fuel management process from procurement, inventory management, demand forecasting, strategic sourcing, financial reconciliation, margin analysis, and environmental compliance monitoring. It delivers its solutions through a SaaS model and works with customers of all sizes to optimize their bulk fuel consumption costs.
The Challenge
For a faster go-to-market, FuelQuest needed help in developing its suite of products – ForeSite, Insite, AVA (Advance Variance Analysis), and FMS (Fuel Management System)
While some products, such as ForeSite, needed to be developed from scratch, others like AVA needed additional features. However, the Insite platform and AVA were already in-use and deployed, and they faced performance and scalability challenges.
Additionally, the client needed to automate processes within its FMS product, including working on an automation and testing tool. However, there was little-to-no documentation and needed an architecture update and overhaul to improve functionality.
“They have been instrumental in turning a 300 page requirement document into a first product release in merely 3 months time.”
The Solution
ForeSite
FuelQuest’s ForeSite platform is a suite of collective tools and services that enables its customers to gain real-time visibility into their operations, inventory, sourcing, leakages, fraud, and theft. It also provides accurate sourcing estimates and control over margin and price compliance at the site level.
Synerzip’s expert technologists first understood the inner workings of fuel markets and then built the product in its entirety. The team works in an Agile environment where open communication with the product owners and proven processes helps them build, test, and deploy the product with a cloud-first strategy. AWS hosts all application servers and the database. The team uses Amazon S3 for its deployment processes.
InSite
InSite is an online management dashboard that lets station managers handle their critical operations data, inventory, safety, and alarms data and compliance requirements. The solution also shows the station status and tracks equipment status to minimize revenue loss.
The InSite platform predates Synerzip’s involvement. It faced severe performance challenges that the Synerzip experts resolved by revamping the code and changing the underlying data model. The team crafted a new dashboard and moved all run-time calculations from the server-side to the DB-side. They also provided multilingual support for the product and manual testing assures.
The team addressed performance and scalability issues while developing new features since the application saw increased usage amongst its customers.
Advanced Variance Analysis (AVA)
AVA is a managed service that monitors fuel sites to continuously reconcile inventory and deliveries, identify instances and sources of fuel variance, and provide actionable recommendations to reduce loss.
In its previous state, the solution consisted of numerous small web applications. The Synerzip team brought cohesiveness to this solution and added new features such as localization. The team rapidly came up-to-speed with the product’s technical depth and refactored the code to solve performance issues and make its architecture more current.
Fuel Management System (FMS)
Fuel Management System is a real-time, web-based supply chain management solution uniting fuel suppliers, distributors, and buyers in global downstream energy.
Synerzip experts are involved in the regression testing and QA automation of FMS processes. In true Agile fashion, the team overcame the challenges of working with a new regression testing tool with little documentation and adapting itself to the client’s tools and processes.
The Outcome
FuelQuest is now equipped with tools and processes to enhance their product with changing market and business conditions. Additionally, with Synerzip’s help, it keeps enhancing and improving its products with more features and functionalities.
FuelQuest now has a cloud-first approach to its applications and has virtually erased any performance bottlenecks and scalability issues. It also boasts a suite of products that work better together and are more than the sum of its parts.
