by John Keller | Mar 24, 2014 | Customer News, Fuel Price Management Solutions, Fuel Pricing Software, Fuel Pricing Strategy, Fuel Pricing Technology, Fuel Software, PriceAdvantage, Retail Fuel Margins
Earlier this month, CSPnet.com reported that CST Brands has identified 100 stores that are candidates for sale. You may find the article here. This is part of an ongoing effort at CST Brands to “assess its asset base and close convenience stores that are no longer core to its ongoing strategy”.
Kim Bowers, the CEO of CST Brands, said in the latest earnings call that in 2013 CST Brands closed 11 stores based on their “lower cash flow levels”. In other words, CST Brands pruned their portfolio of stores to rid the company of their bottom performers.
PriceAdvantage provides the analysis views and reports to quickly zero in on the under-performing locations by comparing store performance to target, to last year, and to other stores. Easy to read tools such as heat maps with color coded push pins show at a glance stores that are dragging down entire regions with their lower fuel volumes and fuel margins.
CST Brands, when they were under the Valero umbrella, worked closely with the PriceAdvantage team to develop precisely these sorts of views and reports so they could optimize their entire fuels business. Since rolling out PriceAdvantage across all their stores in 2012, CST Brands now reaps the benefit of this rich information in PriceAdvantage to deliver on the promise to Wall Street that CST Brands will continue to identify the stores that are the best candidates for sale, and the best candidates for the CST Brands wholesale business.
by John Keller | Mar 24, 2014 | Customer News, Fuel Software, Industry News, Retail Fuel Margins
According to a recent research note from Raymond James & Associates, retail fuel margins averaged $0.185 per gallon in January (up 39% year over year) and $0.141 per gallon in February (down 13% year over year). The research is based on tracking retail fuel margins from Casey’s General Stores, CST Brands, Murphy USA, The Pantry, Susser, and TravelCenters of America.
Raymond James & Associates uses this information, as well as data from OPIS and futures contracts, to predict retail fuel margins of the first quarter to be $0.11 per gallon for CST Brands. That would be a 38% improvement year over year, attributed to a new pricing strategy that has a greater emphasis on margins, implemented after CST Brands spun off from Valero last year.
CST Brands uses PriceAdvantage as their fuel software across all their US stores.
by John Keller | Mar 24, 2014 | Customer News, Fuel Pricing Software, Fuel Pricing Strategy, Fuel Software, PriceAdvantage
The first meeting of the PriceAdvantage Customer Advisory Board was held at the corporate headquarters of CST Brands in San Antonio, Texas, and the meeting was a smashing success.
The members of the PriceAdvantage Customer Advisory Board are
- Tony Castro, Manager Fuel Pricing, CST Brands
- Gabe Olives, Director of Fuels, Rutter’s
- Bryan Zeiger, Director of Fuel Marketing, Spinx
- Joe Wills, Fuels Manager, The Wills Group
- Lance Gentry, Director of Fuels and Information Technology, Kocolene
- Jeff Bush, Director of Fuel Management, Parker’s
Tony Castro showed us how CST Brands uses their PriceAdvantage fuel software to manage fuel prices across each of their stores, as well as how CST Brands uses PriceAdvantage for executive level reporting. We also had a lively discussion about what is most important for the upcoming releases of PriceAdvantage.
The mission of the Customer Advisory Board is to connect industry leaders for the purpose of innovation. The PriceAdvantage team has always put an emphasis on customer collaboration, and the Customer Advisory Board is one more way to make collaboration happen.
We learned a lot from our inaugural gathering, and I look forward to our upcoming meetings as we build the future of PriceAdvantage together.
by John Keller | Mar 13, 2014 | Customer News, Fuel Price Management Solutions, Fuel Price Optimization, Fuel Pricing Software, Fuel Software
It’s interesting to mine retail fuel information from financial results of publicly held c-store companies. For example, take a look at the numbers achieved by CST Brands and compare them to Susser for the 2013 fiscal year.
Go beyond the store count, and the fact that CST Brands is managing nearly twice as many stores. Zero in on the specifics of gallons per store and gross margin in cents per gallon. Then extrapolate the average fuel profit per store in 2013. The results are displayed in the table below.
| |
Stores |
Gallons Sold |
Gallons/Store |
Gross Margin (CPG) |
Average Profit Per Store in 2013 |
| CST Brands |
1,036 |
1,889,565,580 |
1,823,905 |
$0.140 |
$255,347 |
| Susser |
561 |
936,232,000 |
1,668,863 |
$0.114 |
$190,250 |
| |
|
|
|
Difference
|
$65,096 |
Not only is CST Brands out performing on fuel volumes, but on fuel margins as well.
These results lead to the question, what is CST Brands doing so right? Certainly one answer has to be that CST Brands has been using PriceAdvantage as their retail fuels software for over one year now, and achieving great results.
As one PriceAdvantage customer put it “It helps when you have PriceAdvantage to manage stores!”
by John Keller | Mar 13, 2014 | Customer News, Fuel Software
The PriceAdvantage team would like to extend a warm family welcome to Speedy Q Markets, our latest partner and customer. Speedy Q Markets is the convenience store business under the umbrella of By-Lo Oil Company.
Speedy Q Markets successfully implemented a pilot program using PDI as their back-office software, and VeriFone Sapphire as their POS. This PriceAdvantage implementation is yet another one in the cloud. It is interesting to note that PriceAdvantage implementations in the cloud now outnumber implementations on-premise behind corporate firewalls.
Speedy Q Markets needed a solution that would allow them to remain competitive in markets where prices are changing multiple times a day. According to Kyle Lawrence, President of Speedy Q Markets, “We were quite impressed with how easy the PriceAdvantage software and the Skyline team was to work with. They got us exactly what we needed”.
Speedy Q Markets compete across the thumb region of Michigan. Their parent, the By-Lo Oil Company, has been family owned and operated since 1962.
Welcome Speedy Q Markets – we look forward to our mutual ongoing success together!
by John Keller | Mar 5, 2014 | Customer News, Fuel Pricing Software, Fuel Pricing Strategy, Fuel Pricing Technology, Fuel Software
PriceAdvantage, a division of Skyline Products, announced today that J & H Oil has chosen PriceAdvantage SMART Fuel Pricing as their fuel price management solution.
J & H Oil is running PriceAdvantage in the cloud, eliminating the need for their IT resources to maintain their system.
“We have been searching for ways to improve our overall pricing process, including speeding up survey collections, and eliminating price change errors. After a thorough comparison and evaluation process, including a successful pilot, we are excited to select PriceAdvantage as our retail fuels software. We elected to include PriceAdvantage because we believe it will allow us to understand market and store performance, adjust our strategies as needed, and give us the competitive edge,” said Craig Hoppen, President of J & H Oil.
“We are glad to have J & H as a cloud customer and to know that PriceAdvantage is already improving their retail fuels business,” said Chip Stadjuhar, CEO of Skyline Products. “PriceAdvantage is ideal for automating the retail fuels pricing process, and ensuring that the right price is at the right store, all the time”, Stadjuhar added.
