Synetics Leader, Manish Patel, Answers Your Questions

In Q4 2014, Toptech released a product that empowers terminal operators to strengthen their business in ways they never would have imagined. Synetics, Business Intelligence, can put its users millions of dollars ahead of their competition by allowing them to forecast with confidence, make high-impact decisions and maximize their revenue potential.
There have been several questions from the industry about this revolutionary new service. Manish Patel, Synetics Leader, answers some of these questions here:
How can Synetics help me improve safety at my facilities?

Synetics will help terminal and operations managers recognize equipment utilization at the load rack to ensure proper maintenance cycles are followed. In addition, users will be able to analyze alarm trends to help determine the causes of the alarms. With Synetics at the user’s finger tips, managers will be able to implement actions to help avoid problems that may lead to quality issues or safety conditions.

I can already track the gate to gate times of my drivers. What makes Synetics different?

Synetics goes several steps beyond that by allowing you to drill down to specific behaviors and discover why events are occurring. Synetics presents your data in a way that gives a clear view of the trends, anomalies and overall health of your business without spending countless hours mining the data. Unlike with many homegrown solutions, users can dynamically investigate a specific event to better understand their metrics.

I manage five different terminals. Do I really have to view the data for each individual site?

Nope. The Executive Dashboard provides the ability to understand the health of your business at a glance. Based on metrics and thresholds you can decide based on your unique business needs, Synetics will quickly show if your metrics are trending positively or negatively. Then, if you choose, you can drill down to site level details. In fact, you can even segment terminals to see how one group is doing compared to another. Those that manage a single site will go straight to the Terminal Dashboard to view the data for their specific site.

One of my terminals is very busy but I don’t know how to decrease loading times without major capital investments. How can Synetics help me maximize the facility?

Synetics allows you to see your complete operation for a given time period to help you discover answers to hard questions. In a specific example, we used Synetics for a terminal that was underutilizing one of their major throughput products. The site had purposely configured a lower flow rate to adhere to EPA guidelines. However, in viewing the loading patterns for this product over the last 120 days, the terminal learned they never load more than three arms at one time. This information helped them formulate a solution without spending a dollar on capital investment. They increased flow rates back to optimal levels and implemented a standard TMS6 feature to ensure EPA guidelines would never be exceeded.

You indicate I can forecast with confidence. Could you explain how Synetics will help achieve this?

Instead of using throughput reports which only tell you how much product was moved, users will get to visualize loads by bay, product or even carrier to help understand patterns for a given day, week, month or quarter. With this information, terminals and marketers gain valuable knowledge to help them plan scheduled maintenance or pipeline movements.

Do you have any additional questions about Synetics? Contact Toptech Systems to learn more.

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