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 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.