Q8 Petroleum Strikes Oil with Four Js

London, England, 2nd February 2004 – Kuwait Petroleum International, under its distinctive “Q8 sails” logo, refines and markets fuel, lubricants and other petroleum derivatives to a diverse customer base across Europe and in Thailand. With more than 5,000 retail service stations and direct sales operations delivering fuel and heating oil to domestic and industrial users, Q8 is a well-known brand in key international markets.

Kuwait has selected Genero to develop a new Fuel Management System that manages their popular credit card and billing systems. During the initial tool selection process, Kuwait Petroleum chose a handful of representative applications from a portfolio of over 150 programmes.

After just several man weeks of using the tool, the return on investment became clear and the development team were able to rapidly show prospective users how they could cast aside their ASCII screens and enjoy the comfort of working with Windows and the Web. During the process, Kuwait was also able to liberate the database backend to support the corporate policy of working with Oracle.

“I would heartily recommend Four Js,” said Julian Bridle, Information Services Manager of Kuwait Petroleum, GB. “Their tools really gave our applications a new lease of life, opening up whole new choices of user interfaces and databases.”

Bridle has also selected Four Js tools for other applications including sales order processing, security and audit control systems as well as the company’s general accounting ledgers.

“We conducted a detailed evaluation of the toolset over three months to test whether it really did ‘do what it says on the box’. The GUI was polished, the Open Database Interface offers us the choice of database platforms that we need and the HTML client was the icing on the cake”, said Bridle.

Bridle expects the web to play an increasing role in his deployment strategy.

“We also completed a pilot web-site interacting directly with the application database. Since the successful pilot, we have become a devout advocate. We are currently launching a web interface and as a group we are now evaluating which of our international applications should follow the same route.”