View All Issues » December 2011

When you look for leaders in propane distribution, one of the companies you look to is Suburban Propane. This year Suburban looked to ADD Systems to upgrade its mobile technology on a huge scale, switching its mobile computers to ADD Systems’ Raven.

With about 900 units, this is the largest Raven rollout that ADD Systems had ever performed. Coupled with this change, the New Jersey-based firm upgraded to the latest version of ADD Energy E3® on a Linux platform.

This extraordinary commitment marks nearly a decade of collaboration between Suburban, one of the country’s largest propane distributors, and ADD. This continues to be a fruitful partnership for both organizations.

Speaking of ADD Systems, Suburban’s Mary Keller, Manager of Applications Systems, said: “For the past 10 years I have worked with ADD Systems on various projects. They have always been direct in their response and delivered what we needed exactly as promised.”

The Raven project placed into service almost 900 Raven units on Intermec’s reliable CN3e model.

While a long-time user of mobile computers, the company found their devices aging, and wanted to upgrade hardware and increase the speed with which the devices performed several essential functions. After extensive review and research, Suburban chose Raven.

“To me, the reliability is the biggest feature for us. We don’t have hardware issues. It works exactly like it’s supposed to,” said Jim Dewhurst, Business Systems Analyst with Suburban.

The switch resulted in several time- and effort-saving enhancements. A few examples:

• The upload/download process between individual Ravens and the office server now takes as little as 90 seconds,
• Printing an invoice at the customer site is now faster,
• Inventory is now reliably tracked, with no more “unaccounted product” discrepancies that required drivers to fill out an additional form.

“The software is a lot less problematic than our last solution,” Albert Villanueva, Senior Business Analyst, said of the Ravens. “We were able to load accurate data quickly.”

One of the benefits with Raven is that both their oil and propane businesses can operate on one consistent platform, Dewhurst said. That was not the situation with the previous system.

As for the front-line users, this solution is solid, allowing drivers to focus on efficient fuel delivery.

“It’s fine. They’re faster,” said Bryan Cameron, a driver with five-years experience with Suburban. “These are a lot better than the previous ones,” Cameron said.

Deploying Raven company-wide would have been ambitious enough to tackle in any year. But Suburban also found it attractive to move to the latest and greatest E3. The additional functionality within E3 will allow the company to take advantage of modules that did not exist in prior releases, increasing operating efficiency and productivity along with realizing the full potential of the mobile computers.

The reaction in the offices to the E3 suite was no less enthusiastic.

“It’s definitely an improvement,” said June Nagy, an Office Manager with 40 years at Suburban, who was impressed with the density of information. “There’s so much in there.”

The staff adapted to the new version of E3 with hardly any learning curve. Training was done by Suburban’s experienced in-house staff after some introductory sessions with ADD Systems.

“It was a smooth transition,” Duane Armstrong, Production Coordinator at Suburban’s Augusta, N.J. location, said of the rollout. “If it would have been any other way, we would have been in a difficult spot, as the heating season was approaching.”

While making the leap to a recent version of E3 2010 from ADD Energy 4.03, Suburban simultaneously moved its hardware to an industry standard, the Linux platform. In all, they elevated a total of 134 databases over a six-month period, sometimes as many as six in one day. A segment of their business - 31 databases at an earlier version - were also brought to E3 2010, putting all of their databases on a consistent level. This helped the firm meet its schedule to upgrade the entire organization during the past summer.

“It’s been a huge, huge, year,” said Keller. “Our goal was to push a workable solution out to the end user.”

“It was a very aggressive schedule, but we wanted to get this done before the heating season.”

As for the transition, she said: “We were down less than a day,” for any office upgrading.

Meeting all of Suburban’s needs required a significant amount of programming. But Keller emphasizes that all of the work was done within budget, and on-time to meet a schedule in which they could pilot Raven early in 2011, in order to go “live” in production before the heating season. This development included working with their existing EMH registers and Cognitive Solutions Blaster printers. This avoided costly changes in hardware.

“I have yet to find an issue that has not been resolved,” said Keller.

That may be enough for now, but Keller’s years in the business inform her that it’s not enough to stay in place, you have to find the next goal to achieve.

“The business requirements continue to grow. There’s never going to be a time that you’re not continuing to grow,” Keller said.