Changing the world for better... at least the world of gas stations)

Month: February 2016

Coffee anti-franchise or long live individuality!

The article on “anti-francise” became one of the most popular materials of www.vc.ru over the past week! Thanks to everyone who showed their keen interest and participated in the discussion in the comments. Below are a slightly abridged translation.

Coffee anti-franchise or long live individuality!

I got interested in the theme of the acquisition of various franchises after my close friends, whose children have grown up to the age of an earning money to live independently, several times invited me as a business consultant, waiting for an expert to answer the question: “To take or not to take the franchise? And if we take it, which one?”.

The younger generation which does not get disconnected from the social networks, found it a tempting offer to open a franchise as their own business – a “coffee to go” sales point. This idea has been picked up on the web-site “VKontakte. For parents, it is encouraging to hear that the children want to “develop their business by buying a franchise that guarantees success”, but our generation can’t be fooled by these tricks. Our “internal filter” was originally set up to fight the tempting offers from the category of “Pay me and become rich”, being affected by business experience in the 90s. It was curious to see what “VKontakte” had to offer. Alas, the more I studied the issue, the more i got turned away from the idea of such a franchise.

The processing company as a tool for business processes’ automation of gas stations’ non-fuel businesses

Non-fuel businesses of gas stations are typically a cafe and a shop. Chains of gas stations in terms of the traditional retail have too many specific features.
For example, for a “normal” cafe selling 100 cups of coffee a day is nothing special, no big deal. Whereas to the gas station it is a landmark achievement.
Same thing happens with the store sales – each individual station’s sales volume is small, impressive numbers add up when hundreds or even thousands of stations are summed up. But there is a problem of a different level. For example, a station can make the order of 500 rubles, you can imagine a store that makes such a small order? The station normally doesn’t have a warehouse that can store the goods a month or two ahead of its coming to the shelves. Even common practices for the retail sector, such as “ADR” system, for the gas station are a great progress. Gas station chains don’t have efficient logistics partners or system of regular merchandising, and for retail professionals it is a different reality for sales, with different principle of pricing and different accents, rather than at the now habitual discounters retail chains, gathering in their stores most of the Russian customers.

Automation is the solution of your problems
RusHOLTS has been delivering the goods to gas stations chains for more than 15 years. During this time, step by step and through local implementation of projects, the company created a single unified instrument for Supply Management.
We started with the system “ADR”, which takes into account the internal organization of businesses of large gas stations chains. For example, the presence of 3-4 accounting systems in the infrastructure of a chain.
Gradually we worked through the automation of other business solutions. For example, we completely reformed the category “Cafe”. If done right, the coffee zone achieves rapid economic effect, because every third non-fuel sale is coffee. We have summed up the basis for the concept of “quality coffee” and defined the conditions under which 9 out of 10 visitors to the gas station say that coffee is good.

In the context of gas stations only flow-process model of coffee beverages sales is functional. In this case, 70% of the taste characteristics of coffee depends on the settings of the coffee machine, the rest – the quality of the coffee blend and the human factor.
So we recommend customers using automatic coffee machines, a special coffee blend for automatic coffee machines, certified service center and remote monitoring via BMS Coffe Control system.

IT-solutions from BMS – is the first and important step towards creating a system of “smart gas stations”, the analog of “smart home” systems. BMS Coffee Control takes into account the number of drinks sold, sets formulation, captures cases of coffee machines’ breakdown, keeps the record of maintenance work, makes recommendations to remedy the situation, or automatically creayes repair applications. The staff is deprived of the opportunity to “forget” to wash the machine, fill in the coffee beans in the coffee machine or sell drinks for cash without the reciept.
For several years, the remote monitoring of coffee machines has grown into a complex cloud IT-solution – BMS Cloud.
Now specialists are working on the automation of merchandising, creating their own solution – the “Atlas of gas stations’ chain”.
All of these programs are in demand by the gas stations, and add up to one big solution, which we call ” processing company for non-fuel business of gas stations”. Processing in this case is a great tool for managing a pool of suppliers, contractors and service logistics company serving the chain. Processing company arranges activities of suppliers by automating the orders fulfillment and monitors the completeness of these orders automatically, too/

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