National Petroleum News (NPN) has been the independent voice of the petroleum industry since 1909 as the opposition to Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. So, motor fuels marketing and retail is not just a sideline for us, it’s our core competency.
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RETAIL OPERATIONS BY MAURAKELLER Bring the Back Office to the Forefront USING TECHNOLOGY TO GET AHEAD core features while not explore the additional capabilities that can catapult your business to the next level. T "Petroleum marketers want systems to stream- line their ordering and reconciliation processes," says Bruce Bates, vice president of sales and mar- keting at PDI. "Bill-of-lading confirmation and invoice reconciliation for fuel purchases can be extremely labor intensive. Today, systems should be highly integrated to the supply chain to facilitate the importing and auto-matching of book values to actual." As Bates explains, in the area of convenience retail automation, a centralized price book inte- grated with the POS, computer assisted ordering, price book and invoice integration with vendors, as well as handheld automation, all play key roles in today's back office environment. "When retailers are initially selecting a back office solution provider, they focus on three key basic areas," says Melissa Fox Hadley, retail solu- tions manager at The Pinnacle Corporation. These include the price book—the solution for main- taining the item catalog and facilitating POS scan- ning; the manager workstation—the back office solution that store managers will use to reconcile their daily paperwork for sales and cash, fuel inventory, and merchandise inventory; and the home office audit—the centralized solution for analyzing and editing store daily data before it is posted to the GL. However, as John Redmond, vice president of strategic product development at ADD Systems, explains, the real return on investment of any com- puter system is typically beyond the core. 22 SEPTEMBER 2011 ODAY'S BACK OFFICE SOLUTIONS HAVE A core set of features and range of ancil- lary capabilities, but because of time constraints and a resistance to change, it can be easy for users to stick to the "It is important that the core of any system be stable and provide a core foundation of features and benefits. ADD Systems currently supports over 600 petroleum marketers across North America," Redmond says. "Our products are rich in features and options and those companies who have pushed our products beyond of the core are typically the most satisfied and have derived a higher return on their investments with us. Those companies have used technology to gain competitive advantage within their markets." For example, as Redmond explains, gasoline is still important but in-side store sales drive profits. "Fully implementing the ADD eStore Price Book helps drive merchandise profits," Redmond says. There also has been a historic push back within the industry regarding route optimization technology and the nuances found within this component of back office systems. "More companies have been open to imple- menting technology which can assign deliveries to trucks and drivers and provide an efficient turn by turn route," Redmond says. "ADD Systems offers an end-to-end solution in this area. Delivery stops can be assigned, optimized and automatically pushed out to our on-board Raven truck com- puter system. The end result can be reduced mile driven and increased stops per hour and gallons per hour." According to Herman Beckley, convenience store product manager at Retalix Ltd., the "hid- den gems" that are often overlooked in back office solutions are likely features that yield hard dollar savings, create sales uplift or reduce shrink. "For example, linking of cigarette buy-downs to the cigarettes as negative plus is a trick that a good back office application should be able to track," Beckley says. "This ensures that sales are used to validate the vendor rebates that are usually calcu- lated on purchases. Also, linking of the back office's NPN Magazine n www.npnweb.com