GROWMARK and FS Energy have given a whole new meaning to energy efficiency with the wireless Energy Business System (wEBS) which has streamlined their fuel delivery system.

GROWMARK Information Management Solutions director Keith Milburn says wEBS was developed as a fuel billing solution that makes the record keeping process easier by providing instantaneous information such as fuel type, tank sizes, taxes and credits.

Milburn says they developed wEBS when the fuel business started to get more complicated a few years ago. “We no longer just handle gasoline and diesel,” he said. “We have high sulfur, low sulfur, bio or soy diesel, ethanol blends – and all the relevant taxes have made it very complicated given those combination of blends.”

“There’s two components of wEBS,” Milburn says. “There’s the back office or centralized data set and then the hand held on the truck level.” The back office includes not only customer information, but every tank that each delivery truck services. “The system identifies each tank with a bar code that tells who the customer is, what product types, relevant taxes, discounts, and if there have fuel contracted at a certain price,” Milburn explains. So all the delivery driver has to do is pump the fuel and within minutes the transaction is recorded and an email confirmation is sent to the customer.

Milburn says this “evolution in the energy business” was first introduced as a pilot program in January 2010 with two trucks and it has since grown to incorporate about 95 trucks that essentially function as mobile hot spots to communicate information. And he says the system is continuing to evolve with the technology.

Find out more about the wEBS system in this interview with Keith Milburn here: Keith Milburn Interview