Big news: PDI Technologies is proud to have joined the European Loyalty Association (ELA).  

In this short video, PDI Sales Engineer Danny McArdle shares why we joined this association and what we value most about the broader loyalty community. 

He also explains how the PDI Loyalty platform supports a wide range of retailers in creating personalized, data-driven loyalty experiences that increase customer participation and drive a strong return on their investment. 

Ready to learn more? Schedule your personalized PDI Loyalty demo today

Want more loyalty content from PDI?

Check out C-Store Loyalty Insider for the latest in convenience loyalty—at PDI and across the industry.

As a convenience store owner and operator, you look for any shortcut, efficiency, and tool to help improve operational performance and save time and resources. Automating invoice data capture is a great method to introduce immediate ROI by eliminating wasted labor on manual back-office tasks, minimizing data discrepancies through standardization, and accelerating access to clean invoice data for more accurate bookkeeping. Ultimately, these benefits lead to sustainable margin protection and growth by aiding you in making data-driven decisions. Here are five ways that automating your invoice data capture optimizes your business.

1. Data standardization

Each invoice carries a trove of important line-item data that informs your inventory counts, purchasing trends, and cash flow management. Capturing this data is a critical step to optimizing efficiency, whether you have one location or many. When an invoice is processed through AP automation, all line-item data should be ingested, standardized, and returned to your back-office system through one integration or electronic daily file. This provides a continuous flow of timely, clean data that you can use to identify pricing discrepancies and keep better track of how money is spent.

2. Elimination of data silos

Managing multiple integrations with file format requirements is already a tedious process, let alone capturing and standardizing the data while maintaining one source of truth for your business. Fragmented data sources create a headache when it comes to reconciliation, adding unnecessary labor with forensic accounting across the variety of ways you can capture the data. There is a way to eliminate the need to set up multiple integrations, and that is by using a dedicated integration source that can receive all invoices across your entire vendor network. This removes silos by populating all standardized invoice line-item data in one convenient location.

3. Accelerated access to clean data for reconciliation

Manual invoice data entry is time-consuming and has a risk of human error. This can erode margins and lead to additional time and resources spent identifying discrepancies on top of the time spent manually inputting each line-item invoice field. Invoice data capture automation reduces time spent on manual data entry and time spent correcting errors by providing clean data to your back-office or accounting system. A single invoice data integration provider can also create a digital invoice “vault” where you can access your history of original and standardized invoice copies at any time, fast-tracking reconciliation.

4. Forecasting using your own data

It’s your invoice data, so you should be able to use it to your advantage. Once your line-item data has been captured, standardized, and stored inside your invoice “vault,” your invoice history accessibility leaves you with a wealth of information to make the right decisions. For example, you can pull data from certain distributors or vendors that will give you accurate purchase data associated with cost, quantity, and packaging that will allow you to have data-driven conversations to protect and grow your margins today and in the future. This cost analysis identifies forecasting opportunities for strategic planning and budgeting and possibly negotiating better discounts on quantity buys for specific products. There is no need to rely on vendor depletion data because you have visibility into accurate purchase data that belongs to you.

5. Data capture to avoid inventory holding costs

Another way data capture solutions can help is by adopting a consignment selling model through scan-based trading (SBT), in which the vendor owns the inventory until the product is sold to the consumer. Through SBT, point-of-sale (POS) data is automatically pulled and shared between the vendor and the retailer. The vendor then submits an invoice to the data integration provider for products sold. This invoice is delivered to the retailer through an integration and sent to the invoice “vault” for approval and payment. This automated data capture of both POS and invoice data creates many benefits. Inventory holding costs are decreased, reconciliation is simplified, and the retailer and vendor together can determine the best products to put on shelves that will sell, creating a decrease in risk for both parties.

Creating inventory and purchasing efficiency with data

Convenience stores have access to lots of data through their invoices. By capturing clean data in an organized system, you can uncover insights that lead to increased cash flow and profitability. Employing cost-effective data capture technologies is the best way to make the most of your own data, putting you in a position to make informed decisions that grow your business.

For more information on automating invoice data capture, visit Fintech here.

Ready to transform your business operations? PDI Enterprise Retail with Retail Site Management (RSM) delivers the next generation of solutions you need.  
 
In this webinar, Justin Baxley, VP, Retail Product Management at PDI, explores: 

• How RSM is redefining traditional store systems
• Why RSM is NOT just a mobile platform, but the present and future retail solution from PDI
• What solutions are available today and what’s to come

Be sure to check out this 30-minute webinar about Retail Site Management—and discover how you can optimize your c-stores! 

With an increasing number of consumers prioritizing financial value as a key purchasing decision, efficiency and cost savings have become primary objectives for fuel and convenience retailers. As a result, retailers are doubling down on digital transformation—investing in innovative technologies that help them adapt faster to changing consumer behaviors.

As a core part of the fuel and convenience ecosystem, PDI remains at the forefront of the industry’s technology evolution by delivering new solutions and collaborations designed to enhance agility and productivity.

Attendees at NACS Show 2023 in Atlanta, GA will get the first look at some of these new offerings at the following booths on the Expo floor:

• PDI Booth #B3419
• C-Store Essentials Booth #B3615
• PDI Skupos Booth #B3823

With the common objective of “Connecting Convenience,” these new offerings promote better consumer engagement while boosting enterprise productivity and delivering flexible new options to strengthen network security. These updates include:

• PDI Point of Sale (POS)
• PDI Firewall as a Service – Small Branch
• PDI Retail Site Management Subscription
• PDI Sustainability Partner Packages
• PDI-Jolt collaboration
• PDI-REPAY collaboration
• Skupos acquisition

PDI Point of Sale (POS)

PDI is expanding its cloud-centric, hardware-agnostic, all-in-one POS software solution complete with mobile POS, self-checkout, and foodservice capabilities for availability in North America. This flexibility combines everything retailers need to onboard service providers, manage payments, send payouts, and perform a wide range of other tasks.

The versatility of a configurable user interface enables the system to support multiple use cases—including kiosks, queue-buster tablets, and self-service drive-through ordering—all on the same hardware. With more deployment flexibility and virtually unlimited scalability, the PDI POS solution helps fuel and convenience retailers revolutionize their POS systems to:

• Expand customization points
• Improve the customer experience
• Achieve higher levels of reliability

PDI POS pilot programs are currently in development in the US, with wider availability planned for 2024.

PDI Firewall as a Service – Small Branch

Now available for small branch retailers, the PDI Firewall as a Service offering increases network security at a highly cost-effective price point. This flexible offering delivers robust firewall capabilities for smaller distributed businesses, including:

• Proactive monitoring by PDI security experts
• Access to a 24/7 help desk and online management portal
• Automated LTE wireless failover to help avoid business disruption

This next-generation firewall also provides content and web filtering, along with intrusion detection and prevention to help secure business-essential networks.

PDI Retail Site Management Subscription

From foodservice to lottery and much more, PDI Retail Site Management helps c-stores efficiently scale by automating manual processes and increasing access to a rich trove of data. Now, retailers can leverage all these capabilities in a subscription-based pricing model that gives them even greater financial flexibility.

PDI Sustainability Partner Packages

PDI is offering four new subscription-based sustainability packages to help businesses meet their sustainability goals and address growing consumer preference for sustainable solutions. Each package includes Certified Carbon Offset Projects, Local Community Impact, and Annual Certificate features.

Additional options are available in specific packages, including:

• PDI Sustainability Partner Package
• PDI Sustainability Partner Recognition Package
• PDI Sustainability Partner Recognition and Promotion Package
• PDI Sustainability Partner Recognition, Promotion, and Activation Package

PDI-Jolt collaboration

PDI has expanded its relationship with Jolt to help retailers overcome their day-to-day task management challenges across sites. In particular, this collaboration helps retailers improve their operations by increasing staff efficiency with new tools and services.

With the goal of driving better outcomes across sites, retailers can help ensure accountability with compliance reporting and exception noting down to the site level. Key benefits include:

• Implementing task accountability features that provide insight into site-level staff behavior
• Driving staff excellence to improve store appearance and customer satisfaction
• Building sustained habits to help ensure tasks get done on time, every time

PDI-REPAY collaboration

PDI is working with REPAY to facilitate the outsourcing of Accounts Payable (AP) payment processing in a way that subsidizes associated fees. For example, retailers often want to float payments, but suppliers want faster cash remittances. Allowing REPAY to negotiate payment terms helps ensure a win/win outcome for both parties:

• For no additional cost, vendors are paid the way they prefer—by Virtual Card, ACH, or physical checks
• Retailers using PDI Enterprise Accounts Payable can reduce payment processing fees and eliminate check printing, mailing, and ACH processing

Skupos acquisition

With the recent acquisition of Skupos, PDI has expanded its reach to 25,000 independent c-stores in the US. The Skupos platform empowers more effective relationships and more profitable retail by connecting smaller c-stores with Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) brands far beyond the historically segmented industry ecosystem:

• CPG brands can access scan-data insights on independent sites at a much broader scale
• Independent retailers can access more national and regional CPG offerings and programs

Visit PDI at NACS Show 2023

You can meet with PDI experts to learn more about these new products and collaborations at NACS Show 2023. Be sure to visit PDI Booth #B3419 in Atlanta, GA from October 4 to 6.

Executive Overview

HQ: Dublin, Ireland

Industry: Foodservice

Size: 30+ markets; 3,000 employees

Solution: PDI Loyalty

Business Challenges

• Reward customers for their purchases to increase satisfaction
• Create detailed reporting through integrations with Kepak HQ and Salesforce
• Develop a fully integrated Kepak-branded rewards website and app

Solution Overview – PDI Loyalty

PDI Loyalty is a powerful, flexible solution that provides a 360° view of your customers.

• Analyze basket-level data for both in-store and online purchases to identify opportunities to
  increase customer frequency and spend.
• Create personalized, compelling customer offers and promotions.
• Design and execute marketing campaigns to more effectively engage existing customers and attract new ones.

Learn more about PDI Loyalty

Customer Results

• Integrations with 16 distributors with 7 back-office systems
• Daily transaction data received from 2,500+ customers
• 2,000+ brand-specific product items processed daily

Executive Overview

HQ: Dublin, Ireland

Industry: Pharmacy

Size: 70 independent pharmacies

Solution: PDI Loyalty

Business Challenges

• Create an integrated system across independent pharmacy ePOS systems
• Build a consumer-facing brand
• Capture basket-level data, calculating and converting into points
• Store, manage, and access large volumes of customer data

Solution Overview – PDI Loyalty

PDI Loyalty is a powerful, flexible solution that provides a 360° view of your customers.

• Analyze basket-level data for both in-store and online purchases to identify opportunities to
  increase customer frequency and spend.
• Create personalized, compelling customer offers and promotions.
• Design and execute marketing campaigns to more effectively engage existing customers and attract new ones.

Learn more about PDI Loyalty

Customer Results

• 76,390 active members
• 39% increase in the average loyalty member transaction spend (€22.06) vs non-loyalty transaction (€15.88)

Executive Overview

HQ: Hull, United Kingdom

Industry: Convenience and fuel retail

Size: 13 fuel stations and convenience stores

Solution: PDI Loyalty

Business Challenges

• Develop a fully integrated Sewell-branded rewards website and app
• Reward customers effectively
• Develop deeper customer connections, leading to increased engagement and retention
• Increase overall sales

Solution Overview – PDI Loyalty

PDI Loyalty is a powerful, flexible solution that provides a 360° view of your customers.

• Analyze basket-level data for both in-store and online purchases to identify opportunities to
  increase customer frequency and spend.
• Create personalized, compelling customer offers and promotions.
• Design and execute marketing campaigns to more effectively engage existing customers and attract new ones.

Learn more about PDI Loyalty

Customer Results

• 8,957 registered customers
• €16.50 – Average spend per loyalty transaction per year
• 12 – Average number of visits per loyalty member per year

Executive Overview

HQ: County Mayo, Ireland

Industry: Convenience and fuel retail

Size: 21 fuel depots; 33 service stations

Solution: PDI Loyalty

Business Challenges

• Improve customer retention and average in-store spend
• Build a more engaging brand identity
• Increase market share through competitive differentiation

Solution Overview – PDI Loyalty

PDI Loyalty is a powerful, flexible solution that provides a 360° view of your customers.

• Analyze basket-level data for both in-store and online purchases to identify opportunities to
  increase customer frequency and spend.
• Create personalized, compelling customer offers and promotions.
• Design and execute marketing campaigns to more effectively engage existing customers and attract new ones.

Learn more about PDI Loyalty

Customer Results

• 68,913 active members
• €16.50 – Average loyalty spend
• 54.5 – Average amount of loyalty transactions per member per year

We asked Dawn Desai, Senior Vice President and General Manager, International, about impactful data trends for the global fuel and convenience retail marketplace in 2023. She addressed the industry’s ongoing digital transformation and why data will play an elevated role in determining business success.

Q: What are some lessons from the past few years in the convenience market?

DD: Starting around 2019, we began to see how emerging technologies could potentially impact our industry similar to adjacent industries—especially those in the general retail space that were already transforming their supply chains and offerings. However, with a few exceptions, the fuel and convenience market has often lagged behind in the adoption of technology innovation.

The biggest revelation from the pandemic was just how vital digital transformation was to remaining competitive. The businesses that had started their digital transformation journey were much more adaptive and capable of managing the fluctuating market dynamics. When stores had to close, those businesses were able to shift to an online model while others were getting left behind.

Q: How do you think digital transformation will change in 2023?

DD: The last few years have been more dynamic than what we’ve been used to. With all the changes and disruptions—to both our lives and our businesses—it’s taken an emotional toll on all of us. We’re not used to feeling so reactive to events outside of our control.

From talking to our customers and other retailers, it seems like most people are looking to or taking time to reflect on everything that’s happened in the past couple years. That said, they also know they need to return to being more proactive by planning ahead to keep up with trends in 2023 versus always playing catch-up.

Q: How can businesses be more proactive?

DD: I think it starts with reviewing your IT infrastructure and how everything connects within your business and supply chain. We’ve been adding systems so quickly that many IT teams aren’t even sure where to begin maximizing their investment and simplifying their infrastructure. The impact of this is even more significant in highly acquisitive companies or following M&A activity.

Once you know what you have, you can explore how to integrate new technologies with your current systems to deliver what your customers want. Data will be the key business driver.

During the pandemic, we saw a change in behavior where consumers became more reliant on their local c-store and virtual offerings. The data resulting from the shift between in-store and online commerce has been invaluable for understanding changing consumer behaviors in terms of footfall, frequency of visits, basket mix, and other evolving habits. Our insights practice at PDI has harvested a lot of data and we’re now discovering trends and actionable insights to make retailers more efficient and profitable.

Q: What role will data play in accelerating digital transformation in 2023?

DD: It’s all about achieving a higher level of connectivity—connecting with your customers, connecting them with the products they want, and connecting across your extended supply chain. Connecting convenience involves using data and analytics as the thread that ties everything together. But you must be able to collect, access, and refine data more efficiently to gain insights that can help grow your business. That starts at the point of sale.

Q: Why is the point of sale so important?

DD: It’s the central hub for payment transactions and the common point of connectivity that provides the data source for loyalty, offers, insights, fuel pricing, and other functions. The data from the POS allows you to understand and predict consumer behaviors. And when you integrate your POS with your back-office systems and ERP software, you can unlock all kinds of opportunities for everything from rewards programs to logistics.

Q: Looking forward, what are some areas where data might become more impactful?

DD: One area our customers have expressed a lot of interest in is sustainability. It’s becoming a key topic about whether businesses are promoting sustainable practices and solutions.

We’re really excited to help retailers engage with consumers on how to reduce or offset their carbon footprint. Through PDI Sustainability Solutions, we enable consumers to offset their fuel purchase as part of a loyalty or rewards program.

Again, it all comes back to data, because that’s how we measure the value for retailers and consumers participating in these sustainability programs. We track the loyalty promotions, what offsets they’re earning, and how retailers can provide their customers with even more opportunities at the pump or in the store.

It’s an affirmation that data should be at the heart of every business decision. As a company, PDI is betting big on data and how we can help retailers leverage it across all their systems and business functions.

Learn more

To learn more about additional 2023 trends, be sure to visit our Trends page.

You can thrive in today’s digital economy. Contact us today to learn how we can help you transform your business.

When you consider the core challenges facing convenience and fuel retailers—rapidly changing consumer behavior, accelerated digital advancement, and industry consolidation—along with fluctuating fuel demand and fuel pricing, and the looming energy transition, it’s clear they’re operating in an increasingly competitive environment with razor-thin profit margins.

Although the industry was never built to move at the same speed as large retailers such as Amazon and Walmart, it’s important to understand how these giants have redefined customer experience, efficiency, and expectation levels for all types of enterprises. The key to their success has been an ability to reimagine their business strategy—and a willingness to change.

When you realize that change is inevitable, the question becomes whether you’ll be distancing yourself from the competition, or vice versa. That question is particularly relevant to fuel and convenience retailers in an extremely important area: digital transformation.

We know that the future of the industry is increasingly digital. Unfortunately, a continued reliance on legacy IT systems is perhaps the biggest factor inhibiting digital transformation for many businesses. Just like you shouldn’t build a new house on a crumbling foundation, you can’t build your digital strategy on an aging technology infrastructure.

If you’ve been hesitant to ramp up your digital transformation efforts, you need to ask yourself:

• Does your current technology infrastructure help you reduce friction while delivering end-to-end business visibility?
• Does your staff have the right tools to maximize their productivity, or are they wasting time on mundane tasks that could otherwise be automated?
• Are your IT processes delivering maximum business value at the least possible cost?

Making a Strong Case for Digital Transformation

Your ability to leverage technology, people, and processes can fundamentally change your business results—and sometimes all it takes is a willingness to adapt. If you think about the technology obstacles inhibiting your modernization, they usually come down to:

• Information silos and a lack of shared resources
• Disparate IT systems that don’t work well together
• Manual, resource-intensive processes
• Legacy technology that won’t scale with your business

Combine any of those elements, and you’re suddenly stuck with far too much complexity, unnecessary risk exposure, and limited transparency across your enterprise. In turn, that can make your business technically obsolete, less competitive, and slower in managing market disruptions. Meanwhile, your competitors who have already begun to modernize can operate leaner (reducing costs) while moving faster (quickly adapting to new technologies and trends).

By embracing a digital-first approach, you can eliminate many of these technology barriers and optimize your operating efficiency. After all, if there’s one fundamental lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic, it was the fact that digitized businesses are much more agile in adapting to changing market conditions.

Improving Transparency, Efficiency, and Agility

The ability to operate with greater agility across a digitally connected world is critical to your long-term success. This is where a modern, cloud-based technology infrastructure can yield major dividends. Cloud solutions provide highly flexible models (private, public, or hybrid) that leverage the latest technologies and help you connect seamlessly with vendors, partners, and customers alike.

In addition, simpler integrated solutions help eliminate the hodgepodge of IT systems and the management complexity they create. When implemented correctly, a comprehensive digitalization strategy also reduces friction while improving operational transparency and helping you manage the unexpected. Moreover, it supports a more sustainable business model in terms of flexibility, security, and reliability across your entire supply chain.

A strong digital foundation also positions you for the next wave of innovation, including AI, machine learning, and robotics. With 5G on the horizon, you can also expect to see enormous growth in IoT devices with next-generation connectivity. Being able to easily connect your systems with all those new devices (and their data) can lead to better decision making as you turn raw data into profitable, real-time insights.

Maximizing the Payoff of Digital Transformation

The more you can accelerate your digital transformation timeline, the sooner you can begin to leverage the types of modern technologies and applications that deliver immediate and measurable results. One of the fastest ways to realize gains is to pair your digital transformation with end-to-end solutions designed specifically for convenience and fuel retailers.

Tapping into sophisticated capabilities is a great way to maximize efficiency. Integrating multiple solutions to benefit from a common data lake and one version of the truth across your business can also help you focus on maximizing profitability and identifying new market opportunities.

These robust, secure, and scalable solutions can help you attract new customers, keep existing ones satisfied, boost engagement, and ultimately drive higher revenue. Best of all, you can implement them on your own terms, determining the pace that best matches your unique business requirements—aligning step by step with your digital transformation.

Learn more at www.pditechnologies.com/

This content originally appeared in “Global Convenience Store Focus.”