Retainer services
CITAC’s retainer agreements give you preferential access to our insight, knowledge and expertise.
Retainer agreements enable us to build a lasting partnership with you and gain an in-depth understanding of your business model. After all, the better we get to know you, the more targeted our advice, recommendations and introductions can be.
Retainer services include priority access to CITAC’s experts and to CITAC’s regular market reports and forecasts. Also included is a subscription to the ADD+ database; information from this database is also available via Excel spreadsheets that you can integrate directly into your own in-house systems.
Supply Chain Audit
CITAC’s Supply Chain Audit is a tailored project delivered in two distinct phases: Diagnostic followed by Implementation. The audit involves a thorough examination of the client’s unique operational cost centres to identify opportunities for improved profitability, whether the operation is a single storage terminal or a fully integrated downstream player.
The supply chains in the liquid fuels industry are long and complex, often involving multiple modes of transport from one side of the globe to the other. Detailed planning and scheduling go into evaluating, procuring and moving cargoes of crude oil and finished products optimally, incurring millions of dollars in supply chain costs. Every time there is a deviation from plan, costs are incurred destroying part of the available margin on products sold. As an executive leader, do you know that your supply chain is truly optimal? Do you know whether you are wasting money and how much profit is being left on the table? How far can you discount prices before you start losing money and do you know where that point is in real- time at each point in the supply chain throughout each business cycle?
A well planned, well executed supply chain could be the difference between winning a customer order and adding profitable volume to your business or losing that sale. Worse still, is that you think you just entered into a profitable deal only to find out, when you account for all of the costs, that the deal is actually destroying value and you have a one, or two-year contract to honour that is going to lose the company money every month.
In the onshore, downstream oil business there are two critical differentiators in the customer value proposition. These are reliability of supply and price (which includes pricing and payment terms). These factors often compete as increasing reliability usually costs money resulting in higher prices to ensure that a sufficient margin is obtained. But this does not have to be the case.
With a well-constructed, well planned and well executed supply chain, built using the 5 Key building blocks of a best-in-class supply chain, it is possible to meet both reliability of supply and competitive delivered prices to grow and sustain profitable sales volume.
In other similar diagnostic studies, the following opportunities were identified:
- Oil company in Asia: Sales of 1.8 mn mt per year, savings of $5.9 million identified
- Oil company in Southern Africa: Sales of 3.9 mn mt per year, savings of $19.5 million identified
- Oil company in Australasia: Sales of 1.1 mn mt per year, savings of $1.4 million identified
- Oil company in the UK: Sales of 6.3 mn mt per year, savings of $29.5 million identified
Contact CITAC directly for full information on what this service can deliver for you.
Consulting on a project basis
Our Consulting projects vary greatly, but our contribution to all of them is identical: rigorous analysis; practical solutions; in-depth knowledge; and an ability to come up with the answers. And all delivered in a bespoke and responsive format that allows you to focus on the issues that really matter.
As part of our project consulting offer, we can help you identify profitable opportunities and how to avoid potentially costly obstacles. We will save you considerable time and money in helping you to discover information and insight that really count. We can also open the right doors for you and help you to make more informed decisions.
Hiring CITAC to undertake a consulting project allows you to benefit from our wealth of combined experience: namely, data, analysis, forecasts and outlook, industry understanding and insight, contacts, and training.
The types of consulting projects we can help you with are:
- Project feasibility studies
- Economic and commercial modelling
- Market studies (expansion and market entry studies) Price structures, feedstock options and pricing strategies
- Refinery expansion and new refinery feasibility studies, margin calculations, forecasts and analysis
- Energy sector policy studies Strategic advice
- Introductions with key players/investors
- Specialty products market studies (e.g. LPG, bitumen, lubricants) Risk management and margin protection
For more information about our retainer and project consulting services, or to discuss a specific requirement: