CUSTOMER SPOTLIGHT
Placid Refining
Port Allen, Louisiana
Placid Refining is a privately held refiner and marketer of petroleum products with 250 employees. Their customer base includes purchasers of branded and independent products, and they are a major supplier of military jet fuel to the U.S. government. Placid’s three-person credit department includes Joy Hopkins, senior credit analyst, and Jim McKay, credit manager.
For more than 15 years, Placid Refining has depended on DTN Terminal Administration and Billing System™ (TABS) to manage customer credit limits and allocations.Results“DTN TABS is very helpful and timely in expediting our customer invoicing,” said Hopkins. Placid staff routinely retrieves bills of lading (BOLs) from DTN TABS, and their accounting team then processes the BOLs and issues same-day billing to customers through DTN TABS. Placid likes the option of billing more than once a day, a feature used when they are watching credit limits on a customer.
Placid staff also uses DTN TABS for setting credit limits. When customers exceed their credit limit by more than the margin allowed, Placid zeroes out the allocation so that the customer cannot pull any additional product. “That prompts someone from that company to call and we let them know that they cannot pull any more because they are over their limit,” said McKay. “They might wire money in response or ask us to submit an early draft of their billing to bring them more within their credit limit.”
When Placid staff wants to increase a customer’s credit limit, DTN TABS enables them to control that too. “With DTN TABS, we set a limit, and once they reach that limit, it automatically cuts them off,” said McKay. The terminal does not have to be involved. Before they had the solution, they had to call or write the terminal. “We can sleep at night now knowing that DTN TABS will be taking care of it,” said McKay.
Hopkins has set up the alert feature on DTN TABS to e-mail her a “terminal deny notice” when a customer is denied at the rack for any reason. She typically runs a daily report in the morning to determine current customer allocation. “Some days I may not get to that report right away,” she said. “So when I get these deny alerts, it prompts me to look at the customer and see whether I’ve neglected to increase their allocation,” she said. “It allows me to go into DTN TABS and adjust their allocation, which helps with customer relations,” she said.
“For me, the bottom line is that, either you can or you can’t pull, and we have control over that,” said Hopkins. “One good feature is that when a customer is right at their credit limit, but we want to let them pull another load or two, I can go into DTN TABS and set that,” she said. Hopkins also likes that she can determine the next date on which they will allow the customer to load.
“So, if you have anybody you’re worried about, you can spoon feed them,” said Hopkins. “Then you can check your bank reporting every morning to make sure that something’s not being returned from the week before.”
When she speaks at credit industry conferences, Hopkins recommends DTN TABS to her colleagues. She sees the major providers struggling with customers with whom Placid is not experiencing problems. “They’ll sometimes get hit for $500,000 to $600,000. I’m using a low amount because, of course, the majors get hit a lot more,” she said. “We may have the exact same customer with the exact same credit limit, and we take a close look at them, see something we don’t like and start scaling them back and watching them more closely,” said Hopkins. “There have been times when we just cut them off and tell them their account is under review. Before you know it, they’ve filed for bankruptcy and we’ve not been hit and the majors have been.”
“DTN TABS is definitely a good tool for us,” said Hopkins. “We consider DTN TABS very critical to our operations.”| DTN: 9110 West Dodge Road Omaha, NE 68114 www.dtn.com |
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