Success Stories

Below are just a few of the success stories which describe the long-term value that SWT consistently delivers to its clients.

Rightsizing the Fleet

A major reason a global chemical company with a rapidly changing product portfolio chose SWT was the need to right-size its tank container fleet.
SWT analyzed the company’s current tank fleet in comparison to projected product demand and discovered that the fleet was larger than required, and that a significant number of tanks were unutilized.
SWT performed detailed reporting on fleet productivity (including visibility into key bottlenecks) and made recommendations to the client which optimized the size of the tank fleet. This resulted in a rapid increase of fleet utilization, decrease in average time to ship, and an annual expense reduction of over $1 million.

The Case of the Missing Tanks

One of SWT’s clients operates a large fleet of returnable cylinders. Increasingly, the cost of replacing cylinders unreturned from customers equals or exceeds the cost of cylinder deposits.
This client knew that cylinders containing product had been shipped to customers, but they had no reliable process for communicating with hundreds of individual parties and requesting that the cylinders be returned on a routine basis. In short, they were managing by crisis.
SWT developed a module in its MultiTrac™ small asset tracking application which routinely and automatically notifies customers of the cylinders they have in inventory. Customer responses are captured by SWT and cylinder status is automatically updated. This system has resulted in a significant increase in the percent of cylinders returned to the client.

Fleet Expansion Cost Reduced

A SWT client was planning to expand their specialized tank container fleet to support business expansion. Their initial plan outlined the need to procure and construct roughly $8 million worth of new tank containers.
After encountering internal resistance for this new capital outlay, the client turned to SWT for options. SWT used existing tank tracking data to perform a detailed cycle time analysis. This analysis allowed the client to uncover costly bottlenecks in current tank trip routings. Furthermore, SWT demonstrated how its ongoing tracking information could be used to keep cycle times on expansion routes within anticipated timing.
The result of this analysis allowed the client to reduce its new tank procurement by 50% and save $4 million while still meeting availability and cycle time requirements.

Go with the Experts

Before becoming a SWT client, a global chemical manufacturer considered building a comprehensive system to manage their tank fleet assets.
As they scoped the requirements for the system, determining that it would require several million dollars of expenditures to achieve the performance they desired. Seeking other options, they contacted the experts at SWT about tank asset management services.
SWT demonstrated that it could exceed the client’s performance requirements for an annual price which translated into a small percentage of the client’s annual current tank asset expense.