Where Fuel & Convenience Differs
Seen from the retail perspective a petrol station differs in many ways from an ordinary retail outlet, for one thing because of the special business rules and procedures needed, primarily for authorization control and transaction handling, but also because of the special equipment that needs to be controlled.
For example, the sale procedure may alter from the common retail sale procedures:
- In self-service, the customer fills the car, pays with a card, and no attendance is needed
- During daytime, the fuelling point transactions may be pre-authorized but during the night –to avoid theft-, all fuelling points require authorization before dispensing any fuel
- You may wish to pre-pay your transaction, and after fill your car and drive off. This scenario brings a lot of question, for example if your car was already almost full, but you already have paid the transaction
Interpreting a transaction may also differ from company to company:
- How many payment methods are available for a customer?
- Few liters on the floor accidentaly … which is not necessarily a transaction: what is the tolearance?
Wetstock management may also be diversified, when talking about (for example) manifolded tanks: do you wish to treat a manifolded tank as one tank or do you wish to track the inventory per tank in the manifolded ones?
The Challenges of Typical Forecourt Layouts
On this diagram you see a typical forecourt layout, with a forecourt controller in the center.
On the forecourt level (right hand side of the diagram) you may see different foracourt hardware such as tanks, tank gauge system (TGS), a price pole, multiple pumps and an outside payment terminal. Let’s just name this set as the ‘hardwares’. On the shop floor/corporate level (left hand side) you may see the POS registers, and through a router, you may also reach the corporate network. Let’s just name this set as ‘software’.
As you can see, a forecourt controller has a huge responsibility.
In between the specific forecourt hardware and the corporate network, a forecourt controller has to provide a stable communication channel between the specific forecourt hardware and the corporate software bundle with high availability, flexibility and with the possibility of instant upgrades.
How Our Extension Works
In our Xstore extension, we have implemented new screens for checking the levels & statuses of the underground tanks, fuel pumps and car washes. As the fuelling points are the most used devices on a forecourt, we have built new views for the Xstore registers with respective graphics for each fuelling point, with full, realtime control. All the actions performed on the screens are administrated for two reasons: to track the sales staff productivity and to avoid any chances for theft amongst the staff (no transaction can be performed without registering the transaction with the attendant information).
The transaction can be pulled to the sales screen after those are finished. The solution also supports blended fuels, calibration, and price changes. Moreover, we have prepared the new screens for emergency situations: from each screen all pumps can be stopped immediately if for example a fire is observed.
We have also imlpemented the most important reports such as sales, inventory, delivery & productivity reports, but our basic idea was to record all mondatory information, with much more details into the database, so after all it is up to the retailer what kind of reports will they develop.
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