IOR

Key stats

• More than 130 unattended mixed road and aviation refueling sites extending to the farthest reaches of Australia
• Two fuel import terminals

Overview

IOR is a family-owned, integrated supplier of fuels to regional, rural, and remote Australia. Since its humble beginnings as a small oil refinery in the remote town of Eromanga in the Australian outback, IOR has grown to become one of the country’s leading fuel distributors, with the first and largest network of unattended fuel stops and one of the largest hazardous materials transport fleets in Australia.

With a diverse product and service offering that includes bulk fuel supply, equipment sales and rentals, fuel management services, and aviation fuel supply and distribution, the company acquired an 81 million liter fuel import terminal on the South Coast in 2020 and built a second 110 million liter facility on the East Coast just three years later, delivering up to an additional 12 days’ capacity to supply the Brisbane market.

Challenge

A key pillar of IOR’s business is its extensive national network of 24-hour diesel stops and on-airport aviation refueling facilities. These facilities primarily provide fuel to surrounding communities, the essential long-haul transport industry, and the aviation industry. IOR’s unattended fuel networks currently comprise more than 130 on-road and on-airport sites and extend to the farthest reaches of regional Australia.

As the company looked to expand this network to meet the needs of the market, it faced some unique operational and logistical challenges. Its fuel stops are often located many hundreds of miles from each other and from the country’s major population centers, making site visits for troubleshooting network infrastructure costly and often impractical. Unlike many of the company’s competitors, IOR’s stops are also unattended, which means the company depends on having the right mix of technology solutions to manage them remotely. When a customer calls with a fault, the ability to address the issue remotely can save a round trip potentially consisting of hundreds of miles.

Operating such a remote and geographically disparate network using technology we had access to back in 2005 was never going to allow this business to scale.

Elliot Mackenzie, Head of Technology, IOR

Solution

According to Elliot Mackenzie, Head of Technology at IOR, the company prides itself on its culture of technology development and innovation, a key contributing factor to its long track record of continuous growth.

“Where there’s a problem that we can’t solve using off-the-shelf stuff,” Elliot says, “we just carry on and build it. We’re full of engineers.”

It’s this mindset that led to the development of IOR’s proprietary HyDip® fuel management system. An IoT-enabled HyDip sensor placed in a fuel storage tank at one of IOR’s fuel stops provides real-time measurement of the amount of product in the tank. IOR’s operations team can remotely monitor fuel levels recorded by the sensor using a control panel on a smartphone or laptop. They can also communicate with HyDip site controllers to control fuel dispensers and flow computers remotely. The HyDip system also makes it easy for IOR’s customers to pay for their fuel at any fuel stop using an RFID tag or a smartphone payment app.

“The networks we operate with are extremely challenging. Some sites we operate are at the very boundaries of signal reception, others get signal only a few days a week, and managing a traditional network endpoint via SSH is just a non-starter under these conditions. With Meraki, you can pre-load network changes while a device is offline and what you can count on is that when the signal is back, so is the network.”

Results

Since adopting Meraki solutions, IOR’s site provisioning teams have been able to connect new fuel stops to the network in just minutes. Once each new site is operational, the IT team uses the Meraki dashboard to get real-time insight into the status of switches, gateways, and smart cameras across all the company’s sites. This has proven to be an enormous advantage, streamlining day-to-day site management operations, and freeing up team members to devote time to other important initiatives.

For the past decade, Meraki has been the only enterprise networking equipment capable of supporting IOR’s remote operations model at scale, but it doesn’t stop there.

“The product alignment between the cloud-managed networks supported by Meraki and the cloud-managed fuel networks supported by HyDip could not be stronger. Cameras, just a security feature for many, are fully integrated into both HyDip and IOR’s operational procedures and are considered part of our service to customers. When account customers let us know about a fault through our app, the Meraki footage goes straight to the faults team to investigate, and with HyDip, we can usually help them out while they are still at the site.”.

Depending on need, IOR has a mix of Meraki switches, routers, and cellular gateways to support network connectivity at their sites, but by volume it is by far all about the Meraki cameras.

“IOR has been a Meraki customer since 2013, and from a growth standpoint, whoever gave us that first free wireless AP [access point] to trial must be smiling now.” Elliot goes on to say, “Meraki isn’t just a solution to a problem for IOR. It’s become part of the fabric of how we operate.”

Looking ahead, IOR is continuing to integrate Meraki solutions into HyDip and is exploring a list of innovative other new use cases to enhance security, the customer support experience, and the integrity of its fuel stops.