Optima’s client operates a network of fuel and car wash locations across several West Coast cities. With multiple sites to manage and a lean back-office team, they needed financial and operational visibility that could keep pace with the complexity of running locations at scale.
The Situation
The client’s back office was piecing together monthly numbers in Excel spreadsheets from seven separate systems, every day. Fuel margin was an important metric that needed to be monitored throughout the day. The process was manual, time consuming and prone to errors.
Several of the vendor portals the company relied on had no API, making automated data pulls seem out of reach. The result was a finance and operations team spending significant time on manual exports and report rebuilds every single day.
Key Actions Taken
Optima built a unified data platform designed specifically for the reporting complexity of multi-location fuel and car wash operations. Here is what we tackled:
- Connected seven source systems including QuickBooks Online, Paylocity, Insite360, Chevron Business Point, TAC and Pearson emailed bills, Google Reviews, and Yelp into a single Microsoft Fabric lakehouse
- Engineered custom data pipelines for vendor portals with no native API, so no source was left out
- Built a unified dashboard model surfacing financials, labor, live pump prices, fuel costs, and customer reviews in one place
- Created per-location manager flash reports that auto-email to each site manager every morning
- Implemented live fuel margin tracking per grade and per location, visible in real time
- Built labor forecasting from daily payroll punches, projecting full-month and full-year labor cost automatically.