Pinnacle’s Smart Buy™ and Symphony.fuel real-time inventory™ make it possible to accurately forecast, confirm, and manage a true “just-in-time” fuel program that can reduce the time and costs associated with turning your fuel inventory!

Volatile fuel prices and declining margins are the most difficult components to manage in the convenience store industry today. The last thing any fuel retailer needs is an excess in expensive fuel inventory that sells at a net loss. Pinnacle’sSymphony.fuel real-time inventory and Smart Buy are two of the most useful tools in the fuel marketing industry for making cost efficient fuel inventory replenishment decisions.

Historically, the entire petroleum industry has operated at the “top” of the tank, keeping excessive levels of expensive fuel inventory at all times. In this day and age, that is a recipe for financial disaster. Operating under the “just-in-time” (JIT) concept, however, you can meet the needs of your customers without wasting money on excessive fuel inventory.

Symphony.fuel real-time inventory provides an on demand, accurate snapshot of what is currently in your inventory at any given moment. Smart Buy, a feature of Pinnacle’s Fuel Smart®, allows you to accurately forecast future inventory needs to keep up with your customers’ demands.

 

By: Bob Carpentier, Fuel Director, Quick-Sav Food Stores

Save Paper, Space and Money!

Electronic signature capture is rapidly being implemented throughout our industry, and most of the times if it’s not available, customers will ask for it!

Pinnacle provides a turnkey solution for electronic signature capture at the store level, and corporate reporting back at the home office which allows you to recreate receipts on the fly with the customer’s signature. This feature reduces time and dollars associated with paper receipts, sorting, storing and retrieving when disputes arise, and lost dollars when physical receipts cannot be found.

• Hands off Payment Process
• Reduce storage space needed for all that paper
• Easy to retrieve data
• Easy to research transactions
• Cashier can re-print customer receipts
• Time=$

Use the following calculator to compute a Return on Investment associated with implementing electronic signature capture using Pinnacle’s Palm POS™, Ingenico advanced signature capture enabled payment terminals, and Pinnacle’s EPM™ business intelligence solution.

This cost savings calculator uses actual numbers from a real c-store retailer and was used to validate their electronic signature capture investment. This ROI does not take into account physical storage costs, another element you might consider when looking at the savings associated with eliminating paper receipts.

Click Here to Calculate your ROI!

A Distinct Competitive Advantage
In an industry where competition is fierce and margins are slim, you need a sustainable competitive advantage.

Pinnacle’s Scan Based Trading application eliminates supply chain inefficiencies and helps retailers and suppliers get products to the store shelves quickly and profitably, providing retail trading partners with a distinct competitive advantage.

With Scan Based Trading through Pinnacle’s Symphony.epm™, retailers have seen substantial gains in operational efficiencies. The idea is simple: Rather than paying for products from suppliers as they are brought into your store, the supplier retains ownership of the products on the shelf until they are sold. When items are sold, the scanned information is sent automatically from the retailer to the supplier. When the supplier receives that information, an invoice for the goods sold is automatically created for the retailer, and an order is submitted to the supplier to replace the sold merchandise.

• Increase Sales
• Reduce Inventory Costs
• Reduce Invoice/Order Processing Costs
• Gain Daily Insight into Product Movement
• Reduce Out-of-Stocks
• Ensure Accurate Inventory Replenishment

Use the following tool to calculate the benefits of converting a portion of your merchandise vendors away from traditional invoicing procedures to a solution where you pay for what you sell based on scan sales data using Pinnacle’s Symphony.epm™.

 

Implementing a Loyalty Program and working with Marketing to enact the plan is an arduous process.

So what is the secret to success?

Keep It Simple! Keep It Fresh!

Step 1: Plan Your Program
First, you need to plan out your Loyalty Program. Determine the specifics of your Marketplace. You need to consider demographics, competing stores in the area, competing brands, and your customers’ perceptions of your own brand. Next, you should define the parameters of your Loyalty Program, including the name of the program, images, logo, program model, as well as vendor and support sponsorship.
Step 2: Launch Your Program
Once the planning stage is complete, it’s time to launch the program. Your new Loyalty Program must be your sole marketing focus. You will need to do all store preparations, employee education, media blitzes, distribute loyalty cards, and do a soft launch in one or two stores to iron out any last minute details you may have overlooked.
Step 3: Promote Your Program – Keep it Simple!
Now that your Loyalty Program is launched, focus should shift to your In-Store Marketing.
• Employee participation and enthusiasm
• Sign Placement, Stand-up Signs, Counter Signs, Aisle Violators, Danglers and Logo Decals
• Brochures
• Balloons & Buttons
Step 4: Tweak Your Program – Keep It Fresh!
As time passes, you need to evaluate your Loyalty Campaign and make adjustments based on the programs results. You need to determine the overall consumer reaction to the program, the promotion performance, performance of loyalty promotions versus standard temporary price reductions, overall store performance, redemption statistics and fuel sales. The information collected when making these determinations should help you shape future promotions with your Loyalty Program.
Change your promotional messages periodically, update your graphics, alter rewards, make seasonal adjustments and respond to changing demographics in your marketplace. All of these initiatives will help ensure the long-term success of your Loyalty Program.
Click Here for more information on Pinnacle’s complete suite of Loyalty Solutions.

Turn your fuel inventory 20% faster!

Pinnacle’s Smart Buy™ and Symphony.fuel real-time inventory™ make it possible to accurately forecast, confirm, and manage a true “just-in-time” fuel program that can reduce the time and costs associated with turning your fuel inventory!

Volatile fuel prices and declining margins are the most difficult components to manage in the convenience store industry today. The last thing any fuel retailer needs is an excess in expensive fuel inventory that sells at a net loss. Pinnacle’s Symphony.fuel real-time inventory and Smart Buy are two of the most useful tools in the fuel marketing industry for making cost efficient fuel inventory replenishment decisions.

Historically, the entire petroleum industry has operated at the “top” of the tank, keeping excessive levels of expensive fuel inventory at all times. In this day and age, that is a recipe for financial disaster. Operating under the “just-in-time” (JIT) concept, however, you can meet the needs of your customers without wasting money on excessive fuel inventory. Symphony.fuel real-time inventory provides an accurate snapshot of what is currently in your inventory at any given moment. Smart Buy, a feature of Pinnacle’s Fuel Smart®, allows you to accurately forecast future inventory needs to keep up with your customers’ demands.

According to Bob Carpentier, Fuel Director for Quick-Sav Food Stores, Smart Buy’s fuel inventory business intelligence (BI) forecasting model has allowed the company to turn their inventory 20% faster than previous methods used.

Click Here for more information on Pinnacle’s Symphony.fuel real-time inventory and Smart Buy!

In today’s economy, knowing your business is the way to operate efficiently. Pinnacle’s Business Intelligence Tools put you in the driver’s seat, allowing you to make informed decisions, based on real-time data, having a positive impact on your bottom line.

• Collect and analyze your business data quickly and accurately.
• Identify trends and exceptions to react quickly.
• Access data in real-time on web-enable devices.
• Enjoy easy-to-read graphical views to give instant meaning to the data collected.
• Alert users in real-time to price changes, respond quickly to changes in the market.

“It’s not hard to make good decisions when you have the information you need at your fingertips.” – Gene Tish, WSCO, EVP/COO

Receiving Bill-of-Lading information in a timely fashion is one of the most pervasive problems faced by the Petroleum Marketing Industry. Retailers need their BOL information to perform real-time inventory and jobbers need their BOL information to quickly and accurately invoice their customers.

Andalé! is an easy-to-use, web-based application that eliminates the delay of carrier BOL’s.

• Web-based service, accessible anytime, anywhere.
• No expensive software or truck mounted hardware.
• Easy to implement, easy to operate
• Deliver your BOL information in seconds.

If tomorrow is too late, visit www.myandale.com today!

“We recently signed up to use Andalé and found it extremely easy to implement and use. More importantly, we get the BOL information we need to invoice our customers one to four days faster than in the past, resulting in quicker more accurate billing and payment and increased revenue for the company.” – Debbie Butler, Fuel South

In today’s market, the volatile nature of wholesale supply terminal rack prices has escalated the need for Petroleum Marketers to switch from the traditional keep full standard of inventory control to a more economically viable real time inventory technique.

Symphony.fuel real-time inventory™ provides real time tank inventory information to provide dispatchers and fuel buyers with the most up to date information they need to make “Just-in-Time” fuel buying decisions.

• Minimize costly dispatcher mistakes.
• Make more informed buying and pricing decisions.
• Real time automated tank gauge (ATG) inventory information
• Save money by reducing excess fuel inventories
• Web-based, accessible anytime, anywhere.

Andalé! provides instant petroleum marketing BOL information for wholesale and retail processing. With Andalé you can even track ethanol and gasoline split loads as one Bill-of-Lading.

• Subscription based web service.
• Dispatching order entry.
• Truck driver hand held system that’s easy to operate.
• Import BOL’s to virtually any back office system.
• Account for split loads and multiple destination deliveries.

If tomorrow is too late, visit www.myandale.com today!

Petroleum terminal rack pricing information used to be reliable and supply used to be plentiful. Unfortunately, that is not the case in today’s market. Today, petroleum rack prices and allocation change in a moment’s notice. Multiple and frequent daily rack price changes lead to confusion, a decrease in customer confidence, and less than desirable financial consequences.

Pinnacle’s Symphony Fuel Portal was designed to specifically address this problem, minimizing your customer’s confusion regarding frequently changing wholesale fuel prices and providing Petroleum Marketers with tools that allow their customers to have immediate access to see current credit balances, available credit amounts, invoice draft dates and times, and historic invoice information.

• Increase Profitability and gain a competitive advantage by delivering reliable, real-time price quoting information for Wholesale Petroleum Marketer customers
• Minimize your customer’s confusion regarding frequently changing wholesale fuel prices and Credit information
• Minimize unnecessary freight expenses due to last minute changes in terminal rack pull points
• Get the credit management technology you need, effectively communicate balances, EFT draft dates, and electronic replacement invoice’s
• Remind customers when new financial information is needed and provide them with an easy way to upload the new information