Over the last few decades, fuel tank systems have become increasingly complicated to monitor and manage, adding to the already significant load felt by fueling station managers. While much of this complexity can be attributed to the proliferation of double-walled tanks to comply with environmental regulations, it is further augmented by new industry standards for compliance and advanced technologies and solutions for monitoring them. The ensuing intricacy has provided the liquid fuel downstream industry with an ever-growing mountain of information to process.

As your inbox quickly fills up with alerts triggered by the many sensors placed in your fuel tanks, you may soon find yourself overwhelmed by overdue tasks and lose perspective of the health of your systems. Information is a powerful asset until you have far too much of it. Then it quickly becomes noise, lacking insights or ability to act.

There is no doubt that automated fuel tank monitoring is the smart way to ensure safety, compliance, and efficiency. But your monitoring system is just your first defense from critical safety, efficiency, and compliance issues. The second defense comes from managing your response to those alarms.

The problem of too much information

At Titan Cloud, we analyzed 30,000 tank systems at over 10,000 fueling facilities in an effort to understand the scope of problems that they were having. The sheer number of automated alarms generated by ATG systems doubled over our three-year analysis period and is set to surpass the 4 million mark this year.

But it turns out that not all of these alarms are worthy of dispatching a service call. In fact, most are not. Far too many are the result of misconfigured alarm systems, resulting in false alarms, testing activity, unnecessary maintenance trips, wasted hours, and a distorted view of your system. Even when you think your system is properly configured, you may find that your threshold settings were changed after a system outage or repair and no longer reflect the correct setting you intended for them. Without conducting a site-by-site audit of your system and sensors, how do you know which alarms require action?

For example, our assessment of one fueling chain comprising 700 sites showed that nearly 30,000 alarms were detected over the course of just 60 days. Our analysis of those alarms showed that only 17,000 were compliance-related issues, and of those, only about 2,000 were actionable issues. Of those, only about 350 required a field service dispatch. That’s only about 1% of all the alarms detected.

You may be wondering about the other 99 percent. Well, often, alarms can be sounded by a faulty sensor, fuel system testing, a wiring issue, or system connectivity issues. While important to address, these are the types of alarms that, once triggered, are prone to be repeatedly sent to one’s inbox until they get fixed. And, while they may not indicate a problem with the tank, they do add to the overall noise that a facilities manager has to deal with.

Cutting through the noise

Poorly configured systems lead to costly alarm overkill and wasted resources. An alert management system can help you cut through the noise and zero in on the issues that require immediate attention. By providing remote access to all your data and compliance records, and the ability to remotely monitor and troubleshoot alarms, you will have the tools for cutting through the noise and distinguishing between real emergencies and false alarms.

Titan Cloud offers solutions to sift through all these noisy distractions. Our AI-assisted tools can quickly analyze all of your alarms to give you a quick snapshot of your system that focuses on your most critical needs first. We have solutions for alarm management, remote ATG management, compliance documentation management, remote leak detection and more. And best of all, our tools are hardware agnostic, so they will work with the systems you already own.

Titan Cloud can also provide your company a personalized ATG system and alarm configuration assessment that will compare your alarm data to the latest industry standards and provide recommendations on how you can optimize your system for efficiency, compliance, and performance.

Sign up for your Personalized Alarm and Configuration Assessment with a Titan Cloud
Expert. In this one-hour session, you can expect:

• Overview of best-practice alarm management
• Benefits from Alarm AI and Configuration Management
• Current state vs. future state recommendations

Brent Puzak

VP of Solutions Consulting

Brent brings 25 years' industry experience to Titan Cloud as the Vice President of Solutions Consulting. He led environmental shared services for a global retail chain with over 9,000 locations, moving through numerous leadership positions. Brent's diverse background and knowledge allows him to take a strategic approach to addressing complex industry challenges.

Remote connectivity provides the foundation that allows convenience stores, fleets, and any other facilities with fuel the visibility needed to tap into the power of technology. 

As the name implies, without remote visibility into your equipment, you’re stuck with manual, on-site processes that slow you down and cost you money. You won’t be able to tap into the benefits of remote solutions and you’ll have to keep performing every inspection on-site and filling out all paperwork by hand.

Remote connectivity is the first step in digital transformation. But it’s also crucial that the data you get from your devices is trustworthy and accurate. When you make major decisions for yourself or your customers, you have to know that you’re basing them on correct information. 

The right solution that’s dependable and accurate can revolutionize how you do business. But you don’t have to take our word for it. We talked with Joseph Whalen, the Retail Account Manager for RKA Petroleum, about how technology has improved the way they do business. 

This technology allows them to identify issues sooner, get them fixed faster, and make them the best at what they do. Here is what he had to say.

How has remote connectivity helped your daily operations?

Remote connectivity allows us to see up-to-date inventories, which in turn allows us to take care of our customers much quicker. It allows for better communication between our dispatchers and drivers, which ultimately saves our drivers time on the road.

What departments use remote connectivity in their day-to-day operations and how?  

Our Dispatch Team relies on our Titan devices throughout the day to check fuel levels and to make sure there are no major changes—plus or minus—at our customers’ sites. Management occasionally needs to access the information in the software if a customer needs any reconciliation reports. Our sales department utilizes the phone app as a backup on the weekend. As you can see, we use this technology across departments.

How has remote connectivity improved your services?

Having real-time data is crucial for knowing the levels at our various customer sites. If there is an unexpected increase at one of our customers’ sites, the real-time data allows us to make quick changes in deliveries and make sure that every customer has what they need. Also, if we ever notice that something doesn’t look quite right in the data, we can notify them that there may be an issue, such as a probe being out, a tank monitor issue, etc. We are able to see these issues further in advance and implement the fixes needed sooner as well.

Has remote connectivity helped you maintain compliance? If so, how?

Remote connectivity has absolutely helped us maintain compliance. Michigan law states that you only can fill a tank to 90%. Knowing the correct fuel levels helps us make sure we take the correct amount of fuel, saving time for the driver and saving money for the customer. Water in the tanks can also be a compliance issue. The water level icons also help with communicating findings to our customers so they can implement solutions before they rack up major problems–or major fines.

Has remote connectivity helped with fuel delivery? If so, how?

Coordinating a fleet of drivers is a task. I feel that RKA has always been one of the best in the business at doing this, but having this technology allows us to be the best! Coordinating fuel deliveries has seen the biggest improvement with this technology. Time is money, not only for our customers, but for our company as well. The better everything is coordinated, the better our customers are taken care of! Having remote access to accurate data makes it possible. 

Wrap Up

Digital transformation is key for thriving in today’s market. Technology allows you to anticipate challenges and solve them before they cost you money. Like RKA Petroleum, you’ll be able to keep an eye on your data, noticing when something is off long before it causes expensive damage. 

Technology allows you to work faster and cheaper with the confidence to say that you, too, are the best in your business.

Learn how Titan’s family of brands can make your business more effective.

Eric Nordstrom

Senior Director of Customer Success

Eric has 20+ years of experience in customer success roles and has been in the fuel industry since 2009. Eric’s main focus is to lead a positive customer journey, drive growth, and keep customer retention levels high.

Beep. Your employee looks up from his work. Beep. He walks to the back of the convenience store to check the UST alarms. Beep. He looks confused and silences the alarm. And then…he does nothing.  

We get it. For forecourt owners and operators this is the stuff of nightmares. Managers are always concerned about prioritizing and responding to UST alarms correctly and effectively and don’t want an important alarm to fall through the cracks. This constant worry about alarms would keep anyone up at night, especially if you’re relying on on-site personnel to correctly identify an alarm and begin the resolution process on their own. Not to mention that if one of the ignored alarms happens to be a leak detection, then any delay in response could end up costing thousands in remediation and environmental fines.  

Managing thousands of alarms is time-consuming and inefficient, but fortunately there are solutions that can help. Titan Cloud’s alarm management software, Alarm AI, is powered by artificial intelligence (AI) to filter, prioritize, and resolve UST alarms, so users can rest assured their alarms are being addressed properly. While Alarm AI 1.0 filtered out “noise” with unparalleled accuracy, Alarm AI 2.0 goes far beyond filters and conditional logic to prioritize and escalate alarms from one centralized platform. With Alarm AI 2.0, users have access to the tools, diagnostics, and insights necessary not only to manage alarms, but also to determine the root cause of the problem.  

Titan’s solution completely automates the alarm management process by using new algorithms to classify true positives, prioritize alarms, and create detailed work orders for the maintenance team. From there, Alarm AI can dispatch to primary and secondary vendors for a quick resolution, every time. The ability to set site-specific protocols and integrate with existing ATG equipment means Alarm AI saves owners and operators more than 50% on alarm dispatch costs.  

With Alarm AI 2.0 up and running, convenience store professionals won’t hear anything going bump in the night anymore. But if they do, here’s a hint: Don’t look under the bed. 

Want to know how you can save money with Alarm AI 2.0? 

Contact us. 

Brent Puzak

VP of Solutions Consulting

Brent brings 25 years' industry experience to Titan Cloud as the Vice President of Solutions Consulting. He led environmental shared services for a global retail chain with over 9,000 locations, moving through numerous leadership positions. Brent's diverse background and knowledge allows him to take a strategic approach to addressing complex industry challenges.