Retail Technology Section – Sunday Business Post August 31st, 2008.

EPoS helps oil retailer expand by Eamon McGrane

It is an unusual time to be in the forecourt business. Many are closing down after being snapped up by developers with an eye on building apartments and other commercial properties. Some, however, are in the midst of expansion. One such company experiencing growth is Texoil, which is in the process of rolling out numerous sites throughout the country.

While experienced in the provision of home heating oil, kerosene, unleaded petrol, motor diesel, machine diesel and other services, forecourts have more facets than a regular retail outlet. There is the fuel business coupled with services such as car-wash and food. In addition, in an effort to combat ‘drive offs’, Texoil’s security system also had to work in tandem with the till. Furthermore, all of the fuels company’s sites had to be connected to head office in real time.

Mel Lundy, head of retail for Texoil, said after looking at several options the only organisation that could provide what it was looking for was Retail Solutions, a provider of retail software and hardware. “Everybody could give me a back office system and a scanning system but what I needed, in our head office in Dublin, was to be able to control the prices of every site in the country in seconds and to alter prices in some forecourts and not in others depending if they were rural or urban and so on.”

The driver behind this control was an EPoS (electronic point of sale) system. EPoS software makes it possible for businesses to ensure that they are fully operational at all times and that all of the repetitive point-of-sale tasks are as streamlined as possible.

EPoS systems have evolved in the last few years; modern systems are sophisticated and integrate with back office merchandising, planning, procurement and business intelligence systems, providing retailers with real time information for managing their business.

The biggest issue for Texoil was the integration between its own internal IT system and the ne wkit installed by Retail Solutions.”It’s now nearly complete and everyone will be using the one system and the integration was very smooth.”

Another important aspect of the rollout was IT support. According to Lundy, Retail Solutions has responded quickly when any problems have arisen. “Within an hour it’s all usually sorted either by phone or they dial into the site.”

One of the interesting quirks that Retail Solutions had to deal with was the fact that at Texoil’s Monaghan premises about 45% of customers paid in sterling. Lundy didn’t want to have his sales assistants taking lengthy amounts of time flipping through currency charts trying to work out what the exchange rate was. So Retail Solutions added extra functionality to the till and at the press of a button the rate is changed and the customer is dealt with more efficiently.

At the centre of all this technology lies perhaps the most important component – the pump watch system. The pump is attached to the till and camera system. When the pump is used the security camera will automatically take a picture of the registration plate of the car and the driver. This appears on the cashier’s till and once the nozzle is replaced the driver has a certain amount of time to pay. If that time is exceeded an alarm is raised. A print of the driver and car details is generated in the back office and a DVD of the camera footage is burned.

These details are given to the Garda, allowing drive-offs to be apprehended much more efficiently than previous systems available.

Lundy said the new technology has brought him piece of mind. “If I want to look at margin or overheads, everything is available at the touch of a button and no matter where I am in the country. And I know there’s a company behind the scenes that is working to bring me new concepts rather than me going to them.

"Retail Solutions is getting very aggressive in the fuel end of the business and it is a very helpful company to work with.”

Seamus Quinn, Technical Director, Retail Solutions, said its EPoS technology had give Texoil full control of its multi-branch operations from its head office. “The whole project went very smoothly,” he said.