Case Studies

HOLLY

The HOLLY Corporation came to ISS needing help in managing its product pricing data contained within its SAP ERP system to support its marketing department in its efforts to communicate with its customers on pricing changes. They were using a cumbersome combination of different tools that was extremely inefficient and labor intensive. HOLLY marketers must take the current price of their product(s) and then filter those products by Ship To, Sold To and Delivered To accounts and then apply pricing changes which they needed to communicate to their customers. ISS proposed and implemented the AKORE® PricingCRM software as the solution to handle all facets of these business processes with one application. AKORE® PricingCRM Integrates with SAP ERP to receive an import/upload of product pricing data to Capture, Search, Organize, Analyze, Track, Customize, Report, and Communicate on with your customers. Innovative Software Solutions, Inc. can also customize this application to fit our client’s type of businesses. For example Innovative Software Solutions, Inc. worked with HOLLY Corporation to customize this module into a Lube Order Management application. Businesses processes that used to take many man hours to compile data and communicate with sold to clients can now be done with two (2) clicks of a mouse! This was just the beginning, our final customized product for this particular client ended up saving countless man-hours which had a positive impact to the top & bottom line numbers.

NuStar Energy LP

NuStar Energy LP needed a solution to replace their existing due date tracking product that was cumbersome and time consuming to use. ISS was contacted and provided a demonstration of the AKORE® TaxCalendar due date tracking solution to the NuStar Energy LP tax department. They were in need of a robust application that provided the due date logic to accurately determine the due dates based on EOM, Weekend & Holiday rules. Another area was reporting on EFT due dates, Tax Notices and Tax type totals, they required easy to access reporting with customizable criteria and advanced filtering functionality. In addition they also need a calendar day, week and monthly view of all scheduled Returns. This was an issue with their existing vendor’s product as they had to create the monthly, weekly and day calendar views manually each time. AKORE® TaxCalendar provided the functionality, user friendly operation and advanced features that now help NuStar Energy LP manage their Tax and Business obligations in meeting deadlines and capturing the details that are so critical in any business operations.

IRS EXSTARS

Innovative Software Solutions, Inc successfully certifies all Tesoro Petroleum Companies including three pipeline systems for IRS EXSTARS reporting. Also accomplished was two years of data scrubbing to allow Tesoro to file retroactive as of April 2001. Innovative Software Solutions developed the Tesoro EXSTARS system with complete integration with the existing Tesoro corporate wide SAP system which then allowed for automatic daily validation and monthly terminal reconciliation.

TESORO PETROLEUM COMPANIES

Members of the Innovative Software Solutions, Inc team were involved in a large $2 million conversion project from a mainframe environment to a client/server environment for Tesoro Petroleum.

Excise Tax and Reporting System ETCAR
Innovative Software Solutions, Inc recently accomplished reconciliation and certification of Tesoro Petroleum’s companies with the IRS EXSTARS program, using SAP and custom SAP programs. During the project we successfully converted several State tax paper filings to EDI filings using PowerBuilder and SAP. An Oracle based tax data warehouse system was developed and supports EDI as well as all paper filings. In addition, Innovative Software Solutions designed and developed several interfaces that provide detailed transaction data from the General Ledger (FICO), Billing (SD), and Purchase Order (MM) systems to support tax returns in either paper or EDI format.

Alaska Decision Support System, this system was first developed over a period of 9 months for the Long Beach California Refining and Marketing company using Sybase and Powerbuilder. One year later is was also installed at the Tesoro Alaska Kenai Refinery after about 1 month of modifications. Both systems are running a Powerbuilder application at the client machine and connecting to Sybase in San Antonio Texas. The system is used for scheduling of refined product contracts. Both Pipeline shipments and Vessel shipments are tracked and scheduled.

General Ledger Reporting, this system was developed using Sybase and Powerbuilder for accountants to generate special reports with special process that was not available from within the already purchased accounting package. The accounting system was also using Sybase as the database.

BPLAN, this system was produced for accountants to do what if type planning and budgeting. The system was done using Sybase and Powerbuilder.

DIAMOND SHAMROCK / VALERO ENERGY CORPORATION

Crude Oil Accounting System
This system was designed and implemented over a period of twelve months. Innovative Software Solutions provided two contractors and Diamond dedicated one full-time staff. This system actually tracks and processes all of Diamond Shamrocks 10,000 oil leases. This system automatically processes and prints royalty payment checks. The system automatically books the General Ledger accounts and the accounts receivables.

Station Master
This system is provided to track everything about any of the 3400 Diamond Shamrock gas stations. This includes Environmental, Fuel Tracking, Construction, Real Estate, Cellular Towers, Taxes, Interactive Reporting.

Fuel Tracking
This system process all the data sent from every store every night with all the fuel receipts and fuel deliveries. We create Journal entered and provide billing reconciliation process for this system