FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Set-up takes on average 20 elapsed days, from registration to looking at your information. BRITE requires very little work from you for example:

 

• A brief registration call
• Plugging the connection device we send you, into your network
• Forwarding an email to your back-office system vendor requesting connection info to your database.
• 30 minute call with our onboarding staff to map items such as your products, trade classes, price agreements and delivery types.
• Sending us a few reports from your back-office system that we use to compare our numbers to yours. This is part of our extensive quality assurance process. Your confidence in BRITE’s numbers is extremely important to us.

BRITE is a subscription-based software solution. The monthly fee is based on the number of active customers in your system, and a pricing schedule. Standard prices ranging from $495 to $995 per month. Custom pricing is required when companies exceed 20,000 customers and/or multiple locations. We do not charge a “Per User” licensing fee. There is also a one-time set up fee of $500 per location to cover on-boarding, quality assurance, and training.

Your data is stored in the cloud, in a segregated database (meaning your data is not co-mingled with other BRITE subscribers’ data), using the highest level of hardware and software security protocols. Only users approved by you, and the BRITE support staff have access to this data.

Your accounting system is well designed to process transactions with integrity in support of your business processes, and to provide the functionality you require in order to meet the needs of your customers. However, it is only one of the many sources of data that BRITE may use. BRITE addresses the needs of your company and purposes the data necessary to transform it into actionable information. Our timely views and reports are designed to help you increase revenue, control operating expenses, increase the overall value of your company, as well as add some predictability to desired month-end outcomes.

BRITE subscriptions are month-to-month. We are confident of the value it brings to your bottom line as a result of timely information, and more informed decisions.

No.

Although we recommend Angus products and services to our customers, senior consultants from our sister divisions are readily available to discuss any financial or risk management needs you might have, as a result of what you may discover through your use of BRITE. Subscribing to BRITE automatically provides access to these very capable resources.

BRITE consultants will discuss with you exactly how to approach this wealth of information, prioritize it with you and suggest what your benchmarks should be, based on other dealers’ performance of similar profiles and environments. Knowing what YOUR performance numbers should be is critical to surfacing any anomalies or business process issues that might arise. Our team works closely with you to identify the metrics that are important in all areas of your business.

Collecting industry benchmarks is an integral part of our development plans. As BRITE gains industry and geographical penetration, the information necessary to perform this task effectively will be gathered, purposed and made available to our users. In the meantime, benchmarking begins within your own company, among your employees on similar tasks and among your locations — then your company against the industry.

BRITE currently interfaces to ADD E3, FuelPak, AWE E-Sys, Blue Cow Ignite and Cargas. We continue to develop interfaces to additional back-office systems as our marketing efforts increasingly yield requests for non-interfaced candidates.

Angus Analytics is currently designing a BRITE LITE system that will not require an interface to a back-office system, however it will not offer the in-depth performance reporting of your company that is the heart and soul of the a full BRITE subscription. This version of BRITE will include all of our third-party interfaces such as 14-Day Forecast, Last Night’s Closing Indexes, 10-minute delay index quotes and will also include our “soon-to-be-released” Hedge Modeler (HM). HM allows users to input budgeted program sales, actual program sales as they occur, hedge positions necessary to cover those sales, as well as the manual inputting of ongoing actual volumes as seasons progresses. The cost for this version will be less than the full BRITE offering.

BRITE is highly customizable, both for the company that subscribes as well as for individual users who can customize their own dashboard content based on widgets available from the library. Company-level customizations are performed on a time and materials basis at prevailing development rates. If Angus Analytics feels a specific enhancement requested by a client would be beneficial and should be incorporated into the standard application, we may subsidize its development and make it part of the standard offering. This is another avenue by which the product will continue to mature.

Once a plan is in place and the desired volumes and margins by trade class and price plan are set, your hedge positions are purchased and input, and your goals for growth have been identified, it is then necessary to closely monitor the numerous facets of your business that could negatively or positively affect your desired monthly outcome. BRITE is designed to help you do this in a number of ways:

• Noticing poor margins may indicate problems with pricing or costing
• Poorly performing drivers may lead to a review of delivery department procedures or emphasize the need for implementation of technologies.
• Excessive customer losses, or switches from auto to will-call, could be telling you something about the way you are taking care of your customers.
• Under- or over-sizing propane tanks during set-up could prove very costly witnessed by too many or too few deliveries to a customer. In addition, misuse of capital ties up cash which can and should be avoided.
• Service inefficiency culprits may include poor performing technicians or dispatchers, old or outdated customer equipment. Identifying and solving these issues will yield significant savings and improved customer satisfaction, both in the short and long terms.

Depending on your role in the organization, your priorities will be based on some aspect of the strategic goals of the company, ranging from financial goals to customer satisfaction. Understanding the importance of these goals, as well as the direct impact they have on the company, will drive employees to achieve the target metrics at the right time. Among BRITE’s many attributes is the dissemination of information down the organizational chain, and the collaboration of people reviewing this information. This allows for greater delegation of responsibilities and goal setting, as performance can be monitored on an extremely granular level. Our consultants will review this with you in detail.

Angus consultants are versed in every aspect of your business; financial and operational performance, risk management, technology, business processes, etc. These are the same folks who contributed to the design of the current BRITE version, along with our clients. You’re not alone and we are here to help.