Overview
Pilot Company keeps North America's drivers moving as one of the leading suppliers of fuel and the largest operator of travel centers. Founded in 1958 and headquartered in Knoxville, TN, Pilot Company supplies more than 11 billion gallons of fuel per year and has an industry-leading network of more than 950 retail and fueling locations that offer a variety of products, amenities and innovative solutions to make road travel easier. The Pilot Flying J travel center network includes locations in 44 states and six Canadian provinces with more than 680 restaurants, 74,000 truck parking spaces, 5,300 deluxe showers, 6,200 diesel lanes and 35 Truck Care service centers. The One9 Fuel Network provides fleets and professional drivers with more places to stop at a variety of fueling locations.
Supernova Award Category
AI and Augmented Humanity
The Problem
Pilot’s 25-person finance team was spending hundreds of hours during the financial close every month reviewing over 25+ P&L line items across 800 locations.
The Solution
AI anomaly detection dashboard was created for the finance team to optimize the financial close process. The Infor Birst dashboards already being used for reporting and analytics now also visually presents the few anomalies that need human investigation and resolution. Now, questions can be answered quicky with dashboards to drill and ad-hoc capabilities accessible at their fingertips.
Pilot leveraged Infor’s cloud technology (Infor OS) platform underpinning Infor ERP, to apply Infor Coleman ML on 36 months of historical data residing in the Infor Data Lake to highlight revenue and profit anomalies- - any line item that calculates a large difference in the machine generated margin to the actual margin.
In just under 90 days, Pilot’s AI application was developed, tested, validated, and operationalized. Because Infor’s technology platform is pre-integrated, data is automatically updated, calculated, and anomalies presented to the finance team in dashboards.
The results
The finance team saves time during the financial close process.
Metrics
Pilot Flying J can redeploy the equivalent of two full-time equivalents (FTEs) to other finance work.
The Technology
Infor’s cloud technology platform includes a set of interconnected services for data integration, data lake, ML/AI, reporting and analytics. Data flows from S3 Financials to the Infor data lake through Infor ION . From there, Infor Coleman is doing the machine learning to flag any +/- 50% variation between predicted and actual margin value anomalies. The results are stored in the Infor data lake and presented through Infor Birst dashboards.
Disruptive Factor
It is very common for the CEO to be out at a store, ask the store manager for their financial report and spot a revenue or profit error. Ultimately, Clothier is responsible for the revenue or profit numbers, but he also wanted to also ensure the finance team had the tools they need to do their job better and improve the accuracy of the numbers.
Shining Moment
Clothier discovered that Infor Coleman ML can be trained to solve any business problem unique to their business by providing more data and feedback to train the model. Going forward, Clothier plans to use Infor Coleman ML to extend anomaly detection use case for other P&L (such as Deli etc.) help in sales budget forecasting etc. With detailed, time-stamped data at the item and store level, Clothier expects to predict the next 13 weeks of sales revenue, down to the department level.