Tips on Fuel Management – In order to optimize income and traffic in regards to fuel and inside sales, it’s important for retailers to possess both a stellar procurement team and street pricing team. They should be able to work in tandem with one another seamlessly to deliver smooth, cohesive services. Let’s take a more in-depth look at the variables of both:

Procurement

Follow these tips to foster a great procurement team:

  • Have plenty of options in regards to multiple suppliers, multiple terminals, multiple trucking vendors and a portfolio of contracts, including (index, MERC, posted, fixed and differentials.
  • Know your transportation costs, from trucking to pipelines.
  • Know blending economics such as RIN, short for renewable identification number.
  • Understand that the procurement director’s responsibility is to supply the system and buy better-than-index or on level with the competition, NOT to speculate on prices.
  • Concentrate on events that impact supply in a given region such as refinery outages, pipeline interruptions, strikes, turnarounds and terminal constraints.
  • React to those events promptly and professionally.

Street Pricing

Check out these top tips when it comes to street pricing:

  • Optimize contract sales via online sales, loyalty programs and fleet programs.
  • Price to your competition in real time based on location and account facility.
  • Set up volume for each site on a weekly basis and maintain that volume via price adjustments on a daily basis.
  • Utilize social media to pique the interest of customers during typical slow hours.
  • Train your director of street pricing to maintain and foster site volume, and stay on level with, or beat, retail margin results for your target market.

These are not separate entities, rather. Both your procurement director and retail pricing director should be trained in one another’s responsibilities as well as support staff functions. For the best, most efficient fuel performance, you must have access to optimal information systems and data, from EPIC and OPIS to GasBuddy and PriceAdvantage.

Bottom line: always make sure the top talents on your team include excellence in speed, information gathering, intelligence and diligence.