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| Our Partners: iRAMP |
iRAMP assists in the pricing of fuels products for the Industrial & Wholesale sector of the oil industry, and is specifically designed to deal with the requirements and challenges that this sector presents. To start with we are dealing with a much wider variety of products: gasoil, diesel, kero, heating oil, fuel oil, mogas, LPG, marine, … Even more importantly we might have tens of thousands of potential customers, varying from large local authorities (with highly complex structures) to bus companies, to paper manufacturers, to power stations who may take huge quantities of fuel oil, to small industrial units who may take just a few cylinders of LPG, and a myriad of others spanning everything in between. All of these customers have a genuine choice of supplier, with consequent competitive pressures, and hence the current business climate is characterised by tight margins. Customer prices may be calculated in a wide variety of different ways: "spot" deals where an absolute price is agreed on the day; "term" deals where some kind of formula is agreed, based off a reference quotation (e.g. Platts/Argus/RIM/OPIS) that is averaged over some time period, e.g. a "lag month". Other pricing methods include list pricing and schedule pricing. Whatever the pricing method or mechanism, the critical thing that iRAMP allows you to do is to evaluate accurately the economics of each individual business deal to ensure that each one makes commercial sense. In order to achieve this iRAMP allows you to model the cost build-up. This obviously includes all of the elements within the actual cost of product, and any freight or transportation charges, and potentially complex tax structures. But it can also go right down to items such as cost of credit, compulsory stock obligations, product temperature effects, etc. This cost model is entirely configurable to the level of detail required, and might potentially have hundreds of components, if that is felt to be appropriate. iRAMP then calculates the margins and returns that can be expected, and compares these economics against validation rules defined within the system. This can be done at the touch of a button, and so iRAMP is an invaluable tool for the sales force, allowing them to negotiate with customers from a position of strength, in possession of a detailed breakdown of the costs and margins. iRAMP includes a workflow process to ensure each deal follows the correct authority guidelines. Not only does iRAMP evaluate potential future business, it also handles the daily pricing operation. iRAMP calculates the final sales prices to the customer and interfaces these to the ERP, thereby facilitating the order to cash process. It also communicates the prices to the customers via fax or e-mail. Finally, iRAMP includes significant reporting ability to steward the pricing operation, to ensure controls compliance, to monitor pricing performance and effectiveness, including the analysis of the deals that have both been won and (perhaps even more importantly) those deals that were lost. |
The benefits that iRAMP can offer include:
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