insights

Eliminate pricing errors – Have you heard about the recent changes to Australian fuel pricing laws?
If you’re managing multiple stations, it can be difficult to implement price changes to your boards and fuel pumps without causing errors in fuel pricing. Manual changes create inconsistent pricing, consume valuable time, and can affect your bottom line.
By manually implementing price changes there is a much higher likelihood of fuel pricing errors, which affect your reputation with the consumer and also puts you at risk of a fine for breaking the laws of fuel price compliance.
What can you do? Interested in learning more? We are here to help.
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Fuel pricing errors are a serious problem for fuel retailers.
It’s not just the ACCC that’s getting on your case about fuel pricing errors. It’s also your customers!
You can’t afford to be out of sync with your competitors or out of line with consumer laws—and you don’t want to be seen as unreliable by your customers.
Manual processes for price changes are subject to human error. Whether you change your price boards through a handheld device, by keys behind the counter, or by changing the individual number, these inefficient manual systems can lead to inconsistencies in price between the boards and pumps, as well as inconsistencies across multiple sites.
With little to no visibility over the fuel prices displayed in petrol stations, especially remote ones, this puts you at risk as errors can go undetected. Managing multiple fuel sites with consistent fuel pricing errors means you could be subject to heavy fines from the ACCC due to a violation of consumer laws.
How can I get control of my pricing across my sites?
With rising fuel prices, it’s more important than ever for companies to keep their prices consistent and accurate between the Dispensers and Electronic Price sign (EPS). Many owners of remote and unmanned sites have found themselves in trouble with the law because they didn’t know their prices were incorrect until after the fact. This is a waste of time and resources for both the government and businesses, so we need to come up with a way to change this system.
There are a few ways to do this, but one of the most effective is by using a new system of automatically updating the EPS changing Dispenser fuel prices. The system would require the ability to quickly allow all price changes to happen simultaneously, consolidating the process into a single platform which can be accessed remotely. We need to eradicate the requirement for someone to be on-site to change prices as this is a highly inefficient process, especially for sites in remote areas.
A new system would need to allow higher visibility on all sites so that owners no longer had to run on the assumption that their prices were correct. A system of this nature would allow owners of multiple sites, including those in remote areas, to maintain consistent and efficient pricing methods, so there would be no danger of violating fuel price compliance laws.
Fuelsuite: Automate Dispenser to Electronic Price Sign integration negating manual processes
Fuelsuite is a cloud-based system that allows petrol organisations to monitor their petrol stations remotely and instantaneously update prices displayed on the pump automatically to the EPS.
There are three major benefits to this solution:
- Ensures fuel price compliance between the Dispenser and EPS— Fuelsuite allows instantaneous updates that ensure prices remain correct and consistent, eliminating the danger of ACCC fines.
- Gain a competitive edge — with pricing managed in real-time, you can rapidly update EPS prices depending on the whims of the market, which allows you to maximise profit.
- Reduces the likelihood of theft — Fuelsuite allows organisations to regain control over their petrol prices by ensuring profit isn’t being lost to unethical operators who inflate their fuel prices to pocket the additional profit.
Fuelsuite brings your price change systems up to date and eliminates the risks posed by manual systems, protecting you from any ACCC fines and ensuring you always offer competitive pricing across channels.
How Fuelsuite makes your forecourt smarter
Fuelsuite is the fuel retail industry’s first comprehensive, cloud-based platform for automating and optimizing the fuel dispensers, Automatic Tank Gauges and other IoT devices on site such as the EPS. With Fuelsuite, you can streamline your entire operation, from real-time price changes to automated compliance reporting.
Fuelsuite®’s award-winning IoT platform, Fuelscan®, supports many global fuel Dispenser and EPS brands. This enables Fuelscan® to passively listen to dispenser communications without loading or interrupting the primary forecourt controller or attenuating the dispenser signal.
It complements Fuelscan® protocol support for a range of Dispenser brands globally, enabling Fuelscan® to securely push encrypted live event-driven data to Fuelsuite® Cloud, whilst also monitoring price change over dispenser communications that (optionally) automatically updates the Electronic Price Sign.
This enables real-time sales transaction, price, diagnostic and hose flow rates with supporting rules to predict out of tolerance hoses that drives pro-active maintenance, resulting in greater hose availability at the right flow rate.
Fuelscan® supports global fuel dispensers
Fuelscan has added support for LED price signs and is automatically updating the EPS whenever a price change is initiated across Dispenser communications for one or all Grades/Dispensers. This ensures the EPS matches the Dispenser price to maintain consistency for consumers and compliance for regulated markets.
Fuelscan continuously (via secure IoT) messages Fuelsuite® Cloud with price information for the enterprise Pricing Manager, who has the ability to verify authorized price changes, detect unauthorized or inconsistent pricing as well as a number of reporting and charting tools.
This is one example of Fuelsuite® functionality, to learn more about how Fuelsuite® can help transform your retail petroleum business please contact us via [email protected] or get in touch with us here.