by John Keller | May 15, 2012 | Industry News, PriceAdvantage
Partnership with Gilbarco critical to the closed loop fuel price management process
Today’s announcement of the partnership between PriceAdvantage and Gilbarco Veeder-Root is critical for those companies looking for a closed loop fuel price management system that includes the Gilbarco Passport POS.
Using PriceAdvantage at the headquarters office, the fuel manager can analyze store performance, review the latest competitor survey information, choose an optimized price for a store or market, and send out the price changes. And here is the part of the process where this partnership is so strategic – without relying on the store manager, the price changes are deployed to the POS and pump, as well as the electronic price sign, and then a confirmation message is sent back to headquarters notifying the fuel manager that the price change is complete, with a time and date stamp. The fuel manager then has a historical reference of what prices are where and at what time – there is no more second guessing or ambiguity surrounding what price is really at the street, and whether or not the store manager did what I told him to do.
PriceAdvantage is not new to the POS system environment; integrations to Radiant and Verifone are already proven in the field at numerous customer sites. PriceAdvantage customers who are customers of Gilbarco Passport, whether 100% or in a mixed POS environment, can now include the Passport POS in their closed loop fuel price management system.
by John Keller | Apr 20, 2012 | Industry News, PriceAdvantage
PriceAdvantage customer Sheetz opened another new store in North Carolina. The new store is one of ten new stores Sheetz plans to open in North Carolina this year.
Sheetz uses PriceAdvantage to manage their closed loop fuel price management process, including to their Skyline signs.
by John Keller | Mar 23, 2012 | Fuel Pricing Technology, Industry News, PriceAdvantage
The March 2012 issue of NPN magazine and www.NPNweb.com has a great article about the strategic importance of the integration between electronic price signs and fuel price management systems. Stewart Spinks, CEO of The Spinx Company, and long time PriceAdvantage and Skyline sign customer, is featured in the article.
“We can move very quickly as costs change,” Spinks says. “Some suppliers do multi-day changes. Central cost monitoring and speed of price changes can ‘signal the street’ of our desire to pass on increases or decreases to the market. If competitors don’t react within two hours, Spinx can react expediently. Furthermore, the staff does not have to stop serving customers to physically go ‘post the prices.’”
With PriceAdvantage and Skyline electronic price signs, Spinx has a comprehensive closed loop fuel price management solution, allowing fuel price optimization from cost and competitor price monitoring at the store and at HQ, to rapid deployment of those prices, optimized for each market.
The full NPN online article may be found here.
by John Keller | Feb 15, 2012 | Industry News, PriceAdvantage
Skyline Products would like to congratulate Parker’s on their new South Carolina c-store. We’re proud to have Parker’s as a PriceAdvantage fuel price management customer. Parker’s uses PriceAdvantage in the cloud to manage fuel prices and monitor company-wide fuels performance down to the store level.
by John Keller | Feb 10, 2012 | Fuel Pricing Software, Industry News, PriceAdvantage
Longtime PriceAdvantage customer Fikes Wholesale, operating the c-store chain CEFCO Convenience Stores, had the highest percentage growth of store count across the entire convenience store industry from December 2010 to December 2011.
According to Convenience Store News, the company’s store count grew by 57.6% in 2011. Fikes added 72 stores during that time period, 71 of which were acquisitions. In January 2012, Fikes added another 63 stores, bringing the total to 257 stores across seven states.
Skyline Products is proud to have Fikes Wholesale fully deployed with PriceAdvantage for all CEFCO stores, bringing each group of new stores onto the PriceAdvantage solution within weeks of each acquisition. Key to the Fikes strategy is to immediately use PriceAdvantage Web for the newly acquired stores so they can quickly calculate new fuel prices and view daily fuel volumes and fuel margins at each store. Importing legacy store data from the old systems allows Fikes to see the history of each store. Then over the course of several weeks Fikes implements PriceAdvantage Enterprise to allow full control of fuel price changes to the signs, POS and pumps. Since both PriceAdvantage Web and PriceAdvantage Enterprise use the same database, there is 100% data continuity through the transition.
You can read the full Convenience Store News article < a href="http://www.csnews.com/top-story-fikes_wholesale_among_industry_s_top_growers-60461.html">here.
by John Keller | Nov 18, 2011 | Industry News, PriceAdvantage, Retail Fuel Margins
ConsumerAffairs.com posted a report that this week fuel prices didn’t track with the price of West Texas oil. That’s consistent with an earlier blog article I wrote saying retail fuel prices are not likely to respond to changes in WTI. It’s interesting to see that the prediction is proving to be true.
