Terpel (TERPEL:CB) is a leading oil and gas company from Colombia. Founded more than 50 years ago, Terpel provides fuel services across Latin America including Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Chile and the Dominican Republic through over 2000 stations and 325 convenience stores.
One of Terpel’s leading lines of business is Rumbo, their B2B program. Rumbo provides fleet managers and drivers with a system that optimizes travel costs and simplifies management. It helps customers from large, medium and small enterprises that need to manage and control the supply of fuel and CNG for transport fleet by providing information, control and an interconnected network.
Before: Manual, Siloed and Unstable Tools that Slowed Terpel Down
Before using Picafuel, all of Terpel’s fuel management solutions were legacy, on-premises systems and databases that required manual management and maintenance. In addition, they were unreliable, often crashing and impeding operations. The result was siloed systems that lacked flexibility and stability and could not be customized to Terpel’s needs. Terpel did not have visibility into customer data, could not make changes without significant overhead and heavy resource usage and was unable to efficiently manage its fuel operations.
To improve these processes, Terpel set out to find an innovative and automated head office management solution.
A Holistic Model Energy Management Solution
After a meticulous process that included several tests and stages, Terpel chose Picafuel among dozens of other solutions as a cloud-based platform for managing its entire fuel retail operations, from end-to-end. Following the successful pilot, Terpel uses Picafuel’s platform today for all fuel management needs, including network management, station and fleet management, billing module, transaction authorization, fraud prevention and as its CRM.
Picafuel is also deeply integrated into Terpel’s systems, like their SAP and station controller. This enables seamless operation of all fueling operations from a single, cloud-native platform.
These capabilities help Terpel streamline operations, control data, efficiently manage fleets, communicate with drivers, automate processes and enforce policies.
Picafuel’s mobile app solution will also be adopted to increase customer engagement and B2B mobile refueling.
1 Million Monthly Transactions
Terpel has been using Picafuel for nearly a year. Managing over 1.000 stations, 120,000 registered vehicles and over 5.000 customers. With Picafuel, Terpel is able to process over 1 million approved transactions across a number of different products every month. In addition to these approved transactions, Picafuel catches fraud attempts and prevents them from being authorized.
Thanks to Picafuel, Terpel has digitized and modernized all its management processes. The automations and integrations Picafuel enables have improved Terpel’s visibility into its data. The newfound insights have improved customer engagement and boosted business productivity.
“Picafuel is helping us make our dreams come true. Accompanying us on our path to be the leading innovative, modern company we thrive to be. With Picafuel my team and I can understand our customers' needs and behavior much better, and our complete customer experience has improved tremendously'' Sylvia Palacio, Director of Rumbo Terpel.
Processes Cut Down From Days to Hours
Terpel found Picafuel to be an easy-to-use and intuitive platform with multiple capabilities that significantly reduced operational overhead and saved time and resources. When managing billing, for example, Picafuel’s billing module cuts processes down significantly. Tasks that used to take long days, now only take a few hours.
Terpel runs four automated billing cycles a month that process a large amount of transactions worth millions. Picafuel’s billing module enables automatic consolidation of 1100 stations daily.
A Professional, Service-oriented Team
The Terpel team especially enjoyed working with Picafuel, who have decades of experience in the energy industry and are familiar with its nuts and bolts. This was especially helpful when implementing the solution and setting it up for Terpel’s needs.
“We launched the implementation project in the midst of the Covid19 pandemic, which we thought would make everything more complex. Communication took place only through video conferences and the time differences and language barriers didn't make things any easier. But we quickly learned that the Picafuel team isn't so easily intimidated and is made up of hard-working professionals who overcome obstacles. Together, we managed to get past the difficulties and reach the Go-Live successfully and on time.” Sandra Califa, Director of IT.