Oil products trading floor

The oil products trading floor is the web application optimizing commercial departments' performance in oil companies.

Situation

ZAO ASPEC is one of the largest enterprises of the Ural region specializing on mineral oil bulk delivery and oil refining. The company delivers oil products all over Russia. The company's staff has to promptly reply to changes of supply and demand in the market so as to constantly provide balance of mineral oil purchases and sales.

To increase the performance efficiency of managers responsible for mineral oil purchase and sales, the company decided to implement the mineral oil purchase and sales planning system.

To increase the performance efficiency of managers responsible for mineral oil purchase and sales, a decision to introduce the system of planning and mineral oil purchase and sales records has been taken. Key objects:

• To develop convenient workplaces for the company's managers. The workplace should enable a specialist to monitor operative information on trade status, to carry out operations on oil products purchase and sales orders and their further processing, to look through analytical reports, to generate orders for oil products shipment.
• To provide managers collaboration, competitive reservation of oil products.
• To automate the process of creating overall report on oil products volumes purchased, reserved and sold.
• To implement automatic data export from the trading floor to the 1C accounting system.
• To provide work via web interface from any computer connected to the Network.
• To develop automatically generated reports allowing each manager’s work estimation and contractors history monitoring.
• To provide a convenient work with oil products directories, contractors, railway stations etc. with further data search using directories.

Solution

Experts of Business Software company thoroughly scrutinized the company's business processes. Based on the information received, Business Software offered the informational system project and its detailed technical specification. The project was implemented on the basis of the C-Gator web project management system within 2 months.

Business Software applied the new portlet technology allowing flexible setting a workplace for each manager individually. A manager is able to view information blocks on the trading floor pages in preferable sequence.

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The system of customizable reports and journals has considerably facilitated work with scopes of daily information. The system stores the information on purchases and sales scheduled and factual and retrieves it by special filters and requests at any moment.

The process of the trades' organization (oil products purchase and further resale) has been optimized. The system automatically selects purchase and sales orders which can be linked to a trade by specified parameters. It reduces to a minimum the loss of information and business failures.

The system essentially minimized paper work of analytic experts. At first, the company's analytics spent much time for gathering, manual processing and tabulating information on the oil products purchased, allocated and sold. Now all these operations are carried out automatically. Besides, there is no need for the company to accustom its employees to the new form of the general report: it can be automatically converted in XLS-file with the structure completely kept.

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Benefits:

• Reduction of manual routine operations
• Mistakes elimination in the process of prices recalculating: excises, railroad rate; volumes of oil products purchased, allocated and free etc.
• Safety of information
• Convenience to work with the system
• Reduction of paper work volume
• Managers performance monitoring
• Running information over all business processes without any fails due to the trading floor integration with the 1С accounting system.

Architecture

Oil products trading floor is a multi-tire ASP.NET application developed on the basis of the C-Gator software: web projects management.

Key capabilities:

• Oil products purchase planning
  • Creation of the "Resource purchase" documents with the information about a product purchased, a supplier, a manufacturer
  • Tree of stored queries to the list of documents; division by parameters and access rights
  • Preview of contents of one or several documents chosen
  • Rights and roles management
  • Page displaying and filtering of the documents list

• Oil products planning and purchasing
  • Creation of the “Sales Request” documents containing the information about a sold product, a manufacturer, a potential buyer and supplier
  • Automatic selection of variants to organize trades
  • Reserving a volume of oil products for a certain buyer (trades planning)
  • Allocation (sale) of reserved oil products volumes in whole or in part
  • Oil products shipment request generating (print version)
  • Export of the information about a bargain (oil products sale) to the 1С accounting system
  • Availability to return (backtrack) at each step before the moment of goods shipment registration

• Basic trade parameters review
  • Actual Request report provides current information about actual sale and purchase orders as well as volumes of oil products for sale. The system of hyperlinks allows looking through certain orders in the report. All reports can be exported to Excel and specified with an accounting period
  • Clear Balance report provides data about oil products rests in all warehouses of the company
  • Manager Performance report reflects the amount of oil products purchased, reserved and sold by a particular manager for a given period, as well as total turnover of each manager
  • Contractor Request report sums up the amount of oil products purchased, reserved and sold by a particular contractor for a given period, as well as the total turnover of each contractor
  • General Report on oil products sums up the volumes of oil products structured by types and other parameters, reserved and sold to a supplier, a customer. The system of hyperlinks allows looking through a particular order put in the report. The report is dynamic and reflects the actual information
  • Reports export from the 1С accounting system to the trading floor interface: “Requests to suppliers”, "Shipment plan“,” Shipment sheet“

• Workplace management
  • Information components (portlets) management by visual editor on the trading floor main page
  • Editable system users' profiles containing individual trading floor settings
  • Various modes of work with the trading floor objects: via pages with portlets and via the objects tree

• System of directories
  • Directories dynamic design (specifying fields and forms of directory displaying)
  • Directories automatic synchronization with similar directories of the 1С accounting system

Development technologies and tools:

• ASP.NET
• VB.NET
• MSSQL
• XML
• XSLT
• MS SQL Server 2000
• Web-service

Project implementation phases / Project participants

Project start: May 2005
Project duration — 12 weeks

Projects participants:

• System analyst — 1
• Project Manager — 1
• Programmers — 4
• Designer — 1
• Tester — 3

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