Deliver Digital helps mid-market organizations make better technology decisions, vendor-neutral advisory, fractional leadership, and technology assessments across Canada and the US.
CASE STUDY / REGULATED ENERGY OPERATIONS
Process knowledge locked in people's heads. A multi-site implementation on the line.
SITUATION
A Canadian regulated aviation fuel operator was preparing to implement an inventory management system across a multi-site supply chain spanning marine vessel receipt, rail transport, and a chain of custody governed by Transport Canada. The technical complexity was real. The deeper problem sat upstream of it. Critical process knowledge was distributed across three to five subject matter experts, none of whom had been asked to reconcile their individual versions into a single authoritative model.
CHALLENGE
The configuration team was on track to fill that gap with reasonable assumptions. Going live on those assumptions would have produced inventory positions that were quietly wrong from day one, the kind of error that does not surface until the system is live, operators are trained against it, and rework costs three to five times more than getting it right beforehand.
APPROACH
Dream
We aligned the team around a single principle: the process model is a precondition for configuration, equal in weight to equipment commissioning. Getting it documented before a single field was mapped was the entire point of the engagement.
Discover
We sequenced stakeholder interviews deliberately. Management went first to establish strategic intent, then operational SMEs were interviewed in process flow order. A structured comparison table mapped every process node across all three SME perspectives, classifying each as Aligned, Conflict, or Open. Conflicts were escalated with explicit impact statements rather than smoothed over.
Decide.
Five artifacts were produced: individual SME narratives, a reconciled master narrative, a swim lane diagram, a RACI matrix, and a configuration-ready flowchart. The engagement also surfaced a chemical dosing event with no formal gate in any prior documentation, a point of no return that would have been invisible to the configuration team without explicit modelling.
Deliver
Two documentation tracks ran in parallel. The operational track captured node-by-node detail, quality gates, and exception flows. The executive track distilled the same material into custody handoffs, financial risk points, and open strategic decisions for senior leadership to approve.
RESULTS
Three SME perspectives were reconciled into one authoritative model. Five deliverable artifacts gave the configuration team a buildable specification. One previously undocumented point-of-no-return gate was surfaced and formalized. The operator entered system configuration with a foundation that had been missing on a prior attempt, with enough lead time remaining to still address instrumentation gaps in the physical build.
We didn't have a process backbone in place. There was massive scope creep, dynamic changing expectations, and no agreed process to hold it against. That's the origin of why we're all here.
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Senior Client StakeholderFinal Delivery Session