Paramount Petroleum Increases Productivity with Navision

Paramount Achieves Maximum Data Flexibility with Navision

In business since the 1930’s, Paramount Petroleum Corporation is the largest manufacturer and distributor of asphalt products in the Western United States. At their headquarters refinery located in Paramount, California (close to Long Beach), over 54,000 barrels of petroleum products are produced daily.   

Paramount Petroleum currently has operations in 10 locations, with 9 laboratories in the Western U.S.

Paramount Petroleum began their search for a new software system prior to Y2K. Running on Platinum for a number of years, Paramount had difficulty in getting the kind of information out of their system that company executives were requiring. Additionally, their inventory was offline, which made it difficult to manage product availability and production needs.

The search was narrowed down to a final three: Platinum (upgrading their existing system), Oracle and Navision. In their demos to Paramount, SCS highlighted Navision’s flexibility and how the system can easily be customized to meet the data requirements within the company. Microsoft Navision’s advanced set of designer tools were key in demonstrating the system flexibility that impressed Paramount Petroleum. Another strong selling point for Paramount was Navision’s ability to handle complex unit measures of conversion, something they could not find in other products.

The management team at Paramount Petroleum felt it was very important to have full buy-in, so they used a democratic approach to the selection

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process. “We had all of the key users participate in the decision process,” states Colleen Harris, Corporate Controller.  “This way, we had complete buy-in from the start.” Navision was selected by the group unanimously. 

With her experience in an even larger, Fortune 500 company that had a $30 million system that could not do what they wanted, Colleen is most appreciative of the ability they now have with Navision to manipulate data in multiple ways to provide to management. “I can’t think of anything that we have wanted that we have not been able to do or pull out of Navision. There is tremendous data information at our finger tips,” she comments.

Since Paramount wanted to fast track the implementation to avoid potential Y2K issues, SCS implemented their Navision solution, complete with customizations, in just a few months, and within six months they were up and running smoothly. Some immediate benefits included a 25%+ increase in the volume of transactions, something that would have been virtually impossible on their previous system.