Calor Gas smelling of tech success

Calor Gas has been using integration software to connect its technology infrastructure and boost efficiency.

The gas supplier serves around four million UK businesses and homes and has been using Tibco software to complete more than 70 integration projects over the past few years.

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Head of development for Calor Gas Simon Went told silicon.com: "We've been very much self-sufficient since we acquired the Tibco software. One of the reasons we chose it was because we felt it was a toolset we could use ourselves without necessarily having to have lots of consultancy."

The company used Tibco to integrate its JD Edwards (JDE) enterprise resource planning (ERP) system with its Onyx CRM and plans to use it to help upgrade both systems by summer next year.

Once this has been achieved, Went said there are other plans in the pipeline including service oriented architecture (SOA): "We will be looking perhaps to make more use of web services/SOA once we've got those packages on board," he said.

He added: "We've used Tibco for about four years now to do our integration as part of our middleware strategy and we haven't used the web services-SOA approach at all really."

Another major integration project has been the rollout of 22,000 telemetry units on the company's bulk gas tanks, which are helping the company keep up to date on customer gas levels.

Went explained: "That's quite a key bit of information for us because it lets us schedule our deliveries in an efficient way. So for example, we don't deliver gas to the tank when it's still half full. It means we can maximise the drop size."

He added: "The fact that we have actual gas levels being transmitted to us on a periodic basis means that flows very nicely into our sales order processing system so that we can adjust orders according to the usage of gas. It's more efficient from our point of view."

This information also flows into a scheduling package which pushes delivery schedules into handheld computers used by gas tanker drivers.

The drivers record deliveries on the devices with the information flowing back into the ERP system, which creates invoices and also be used to assess driver performance.

Now this tech is proven, the company plans to extend it to its gas bottle and maintenance business in the near future.