How We Increased Revenue Fivefold with IT Solutions

"Oyl Resource Group" was a small company relying on manual labor and low efficiency.

To become a market leader, we had to master IT from scratch: hire employees, develop tools tailored to our needs, and offer clients new services. Read more about our mistakes and successes in the article.

The company "Oyl Resource Group" was founded in 2014. We traded fuel, and back then, we had only 30 employees. Everyone worked with their own customer databases in Excel files. There was almost no control over the work of managers and logisticians. As a result, the company incurred high costs. The prices at which managers actually sold products and the terms under which logisticians negotiated with carriers were known only to them.

We had few clients, and therefore, small revenue. Due to the large volume of manual labor, the overall efficiency of the company remained very low. But we wanted to become an industry leader and enter new raw material markets. However, in this state, the company couldn't scale quickly. The absence of automated and transparent business processes made it difficult to see the full picture of what was happening in the business.

So we decided to start, like everyone else, with 1C.

How We Hired Employees for the IT Department

The company had no IT specialists. We knew what functions we needed from 1C, and we thought that would be enough. We bought the configuration and hired a developer in-house.

There was no one to set tasks for the developer and evaluate them. As a result, the developed functionality was unusable. We wasted time and money but didn’t get results.

At that point, we decided to hire a technical director—someone with an IT background and management experience. This person had to develop the company's automation strategy for the next few years and implement it.

The technical director conducted an audit and benchmarking, determining the tasks that the accounting system should solve and studying the competitors' experience. He decided to choose 1C "Wholesale Trade Management" and hire a large contractor to refine it. However, this approach turned out to be unsuccessful.

The contractor did not immerse themselves in our tasks. The work was structured in such a way that the contractor presented results every two weeks. Our employees—managers, logisticians, accountants—tested the functionality and provided feedback. The contractor took it and came back after two weeks. Our employees had to reorient themselves every time, figuring out what had been done last time and what had changed based on their feedback.

The process moved slowly. But we needed continuous work, with rapid integration and feedback collection. This is why we decided to refuse the contractor and hire developers in-house.

The first in-house employees solved our problems. They immersed themselves in the specifics of the market, worked on the configuration daily, and processed feedback within a day. As a result, the work process for 1C became continuous.

We were able to switch to the improved configuration in a short time—four months after its purchase. From then on, we gradually developed it, expanding the IT department.

The accounting system that fully covered the company's needs for buying and selling petroleum products was ready one and a half years after we purchased the configuration.

Five IT Solutions for Internal Use That Helped Us Earn More

Now, we are developing automated services for our clients. But we started with products for our employees.

Accounting System

We work with a custom configuration based on 1C. It now consists of more than 50 automation blocks. The system allows us to quickly launch new processes. For example, if the company opens a department for selling concrete, it will take no more than a month to launch the relevant block for this direction.

Transaction Passports

Example of a transaction passport — an agreement with a supplier.

The "Transaction Passport" tool increases the efficiency of the logistics department. All agreements with buyers and suppliers are recorded in the transaction passport: prices, coordinates of the shipping location, margins, transport costs, and profitability.

The system automatically links the most profitable "supplier+buyer" pairs based on the data provided and calculates how profitable each transaction with a counterparty will be.

Based on this data, the manager can quickly calculate how to most profitably source 1000 tons of grain for Buyer A: 300 tons from Farmer B, 450 tons from Farmer C, and another 250 tons from Farmer D.

This tool improved the logistics department's efficiency and established control over compliance with the deal conditions and margins. Without it, logisticians spent a lot of time calling carriers to gather information and calculate transportation costs. Sales managers had to manually calculate the margin for each deal.

Fuel Delivery Cost Calculator

With this tool, a manager can get the best offer for a client in 20 seconds, taking into account their conditions. Imagine: a client calls and orders a ton of diesel fuel with delivery, but they don't know which oil refinery to order from to get the best price for both the product and its transportation.

The market is such that prices change regularly, and one can ship the product from the nearest refinery at a higher price but save on delivery, or vice versa.

The manager enters the client's data into the fuel delivery cost calculator: fuel type, warehouse address, delivery volume.

The program calculates and sorts available options considering delivery and shows a map with the route from the refinery to the client's warehouse. The weather, which also affects fuel costs, is displayed as well.

Without the calculator, the manager would spend at least an hour checking current prices and calculating delivery costs from different suppliers.

Current Price Newsletter

Many factors influence the wholesale price of petroleum products: demand, weather, global market prices, fuel volume at a particular supplier. Therefore, price lists are updated daily.

Clients who want to make an order at the best price need to open several suppliers' and oil refinery websites, compare prices, calculate the total order cost, and then call the selected supplier to request a discount or payment extension.

We made life easier for our clients. Every morning, we collect prices from all suppliers, generate a price list, and send it to our counterparties.

The database currently has 6,000 subscribers, and we continually ensure the accuracy of contact addresses. Not everyone opens our emails every time, as companies order fuel not daily, but, for example, once a month.

Additionally, managers duplicate the price list to clients via WhatsApp and Telegram, reaching almost 1,000 clients.

The 1C system, where the price list is generated, is integrated with Bitrix24. The newsletter is sent to internal employees via Bitrix24.

To minimize the risk of our newsletter going to spam, we made each email unique. Each new email signature includes a unique phrase. As a result, email programs allow all our emails through.

The newsletter service helps us keep our clients regularly informed about current prices and provides a list of all basises.

Mobile Application for Ordering Petroleum Products

Image of the "Fuel" mobile app and ORG-Market marketplace.

In 2019, we launched the mobile application "Fuel." In the first stage, it functioned as a price list with current prices. Later, we expanded its functionality, and customers gained the ability to place orders through their personal account, track order status, and download closing documents.

What We Achieved

The development of the IT department allowed us to scale quickly and expand our workforce to handle the growing volume of work. New IT solutions helped us increase revenue: the company’s turnover in 2017 was 3.4 billion rubles, and in 2021, it reached 12.4 billion rubles.

The profit growth enabled us to enter new markets. We now trade oil, petroleum products, petrochemicals, and grain both domestically and in the markets of the CIS countries and the EU.

Sergey Tereshkin, CEO of "Oyl Resource Group"

We are also developing a new informational product on the market—the raw materials marketplace ORG-Market. We will tell you more about it in the next publication.




Translated using ChatGPT