Kuzminblog

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

Category: Gas station chains – non-fuel businesses Page 3 of 4

Why сonsulting does not always work?

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On 03.10.2016

In Gas station chains - non-fuel businesses, RusHOLTS

Alexander Kuzmin, RusHOLTS CEO, spoke at the conference “Global and local markets of oil and petroleum products: the analysis, pricing, trade flows“, presenting the report on the non-fuel businesses of filling stations. Development and marketing of modern gas station chain have become relevant and even a prime-time topic for Russian gas station chains, both large and small. Request for an effective program of roadside service comes from the top of the Vertically Integrated Oil Companies’ management which is good. On the other hand it is sad that in the minds of many leaders the level of understanding of the non-fuel business development remained at the 2010 level.

Recently, representatives of the world’s leading management consulting companies have spoken a lot about the need for Russian gas stations chains to develop their potential of non-fuel businesses. In most cases, to the audience’s attention are offered the “best practices” based on the experience of more mature foreign markets with no less than half a century of history. Why are these recommendations still not massively implemented in the Russian conditions?

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Fully functional Internet of Things for gas stations is ready to take off

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On 22.09.2016

In Gas station chains - cafe, Gas station chains - non-fuel businesses, RusHOLTS

The Russian market of IoT solutions has a pronounced contrast compared to Europe and the United States in terms of ensuring connectivity of networks for M2M-technology devices. Its potential is regarded as a very high one. Therefore, analytical firm J’son & Partners Consulting in its research on the results of 2016 for the market of distributed systems and telemetry, remote monitoring and control services paid some special attention to the Russian Internet of Things market. Non-fuel businesses of filling stations may become the exemplary ones for the whole IoT industry, because the industry has a request for major changes to be made. It’s one thing when startups are looking for new items, and quite another one when such a request comes from the leaders of Vertically Integrated Oil Companies (VIOC).

What exactly J’son & Partners Consulting analysts evaluated?
Both the level of penetration and scale of systems that were examined in the study in the were assessed by the amount of wired and wireless devices in the segment of machine-to-machine (M2M), which are automatically (or with minimal human involvement) produce and transmit data collected by telemetry systems, and execute commands of these systems. Devices with built-in data processing functionality were not taken into account. The main objective of the study was to evaluate the prospects of transformation of distributed telemetry systems in the light of Internet of Things (IoT) future development.

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Why I invite Costa Express in Russia or «Welcome and No Trespassing»

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On 26.08.2016

In Gas station chains - cafe, Gas station chains - non-fuel businesses, RusHOLTS, Сoffee business

“Without my friends there’s a little bit of me, but with a lot of friends there’s plenty of myself” – lines from a soviet children’s song perfectly describes the essential meaning of co-operation in any business. You can be the author of most innovative solutions, to develop breakthrough technologies, but it’s only going to be possible to bring it to a state of “finished product” by going through a complex chain of cooperation with a number of business partners.

And this is true even for applied business initiatives of the microscopic, compared to the market standards, formats. Opening a small shop selling two or three positions of coffee beverages and about the same range of pastries (i.e. we’re talking about literally micro scale of business, not even SMBs), immediately causes the owners of such an enterprise to the need to acquire the suppliers of coffee machines, cups, coffee beans or ready-to-use blends , semi-finished products for baking, microwave oven – and so on and so forth.

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Project Marlow – сoffee GOELRO* plan

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On 09.08.2016

In Gas station chains - cafe, Gas station chains - non-fuel businesses, Сoffee business

In 2011, Costa Coffee, the second largest chain of coffee shops, decided to expand its portfolio and hit the vending area.

The movement in the new direction began with the acquisition of the Coffee Nation chain – thus Costa Express brand was born. Costa decided not to lose time and quickly started to transform the quality of vending coffee to new heights.
The main tool for the breakthrough was going to be a new approach to the implementation of the vending machine itself to make it an example of all that people usually invest in the concept of “innovation”.

Brewing high-quality coffee “from-grain-to-the-cup” via the vending machine – it’s a constant challenge. At some stage it was even a challenge to the very common sense. Getting a consistently high level of quality in the long run was not allowed by the specific historical moment’s technology.

The

The “Marlow Project” team

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Is Your Cup of Coffee Worth Paying that Price?

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On 04.08.2016

In Gas station chains - cafe, Gas station chains - non-fuel businesses, Сoffee business

How much should a cup of your favorite coffee cost? What key factors does the price include? Which coffee is cheaper? One will hardly find the exact answer to all those questions when considering a well-flavored aromatic drink, as we are speaking of a tasty one. 

Regularly proceeding with an in-depth statistics and analysis, coffee market experts are very unlikely to reveal the truth. They know that the average price may range from $0.5 to $1 per cup of your beloved espresso or Americano. Those drinks do not require additional ingredients like milk making cost price lower if compared with latte o cappuccino. Producers and marketers benefit from enormous revenues selling their products with up to 1000% markup. For this reason, the niche appears to have a great potential for businesses, which use all possible means to protect their segment keeping newcomers away. They established an average market price, which is about $1 per cup.

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Efficient Solutions to Reduce Human Factor Errors at Filling Stations

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On 18.07.2016

In Gas station chains - cafe, Gas station chains - non-fuel businesses, RusHOLTS, Сoffee business

My colleagues often blame me for inventing efficient tools that reduce the influence of human factor. They often say I don’t like people.

Well, it’s true. You can’t like all the people, anyway. However, every time I share my ideas on the human factor, it does not mean I reproach filling station operators or other employees for being negligent or low qualified. You can always find a responsible and initiative person as well as those who suffer from a lack of ambitions being unable to perform an extra move. Some employees try their best to follow their duties and fulfill their every responsibility while other do not give a damn what employers expect from them. Others make efforts to be a real pain in the neck interfering with devices operation without having enough knowledge and operational skills.

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Fuel for drivers. Why G-Drive does everything right

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On 12.07.2016

In Gas station chains - non-fuel businesses, RusHOLTS

Savvy marketing does not always help, but it certainly never hurts. The universal rule that brings to life an infinite number of brands, promotion campaigns and rebrandings of virtually anything around us. It works in the fuel segment, too – the most striking example of it is the G-Drive: a brand under which merged a premium fuel for cars and an energy drink. Any fan of “Zenith”, as well as any active Internet user was faced with a G-Drive advertising campaign: the famous Hulk during training sessions performs exorbitant power tricks – tears the ball apart, or does the same to the net, then makes his colleagues looks like extras in game situations.

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Life after oil. The transformation of the gas station

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On 27.06.2016

In Gas station chains - cafe, Gas station chains - non-fuel businesses, RusHOLTS

«Life After Oil» is one of the most quoted events held during the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum. “For our country the oil is everything, it is 25% of GDP. So to imagine the structure of our economy without the oil which has not only a direct impact, but also an indirect contribution to GDP by attracting investment through consumption, is probably impossible”,- quote from a speech by Herman Gref.
Accepting this new reality is difficult not only to Russia. In Canada they also believe that country’s status as an energy superpower is under threat because of the more rapid speed of decline of the era of fossil fuels on the market than it was thought previously.
We’ve told you already about the history of the financial relationship of David Rockefeller and company Exxon Mobile.
David Rockefeller-Sr., the grandson of the founder of the dynasty, said he had lost faith in Exxon Mobil and donated its shares, which he’d got directly from his great-grandfather, to a non-profit Rockefeller Family Fund, which deals with environmental issues.
For non-fuel gas station businesses this trend has some good news in it. The modern driver’s need for a cup of coffee and some rest occurs more frequently than his car runs out of gasoline. This can easily be confirmed by the figures. Shell in 2015 had an operating loss from the core operations in the tune of $5.7 billion, but profits from “auxiliary” businesses, including retail, have grown over the past year three-fold to some $10.2 billion. Source >>
Therefore i consider an interview of Istvan Kapitani, executive vice president and Head of Retail businesses in Royal Dutch Shell, to be an essential one.
Istvan Kapitani joined the company in 1987 as a manager of filling station in Hungary, namely at his homeland. Today he leads the direction, which includes more sales outlets than Starbucks or McDonald’s. 43 000 gas stations, 500 000 employees and 25 million customers in 70 countries every day.

The future of fuel retail
Many of the current problems of fuel retailers today can be reduced to one thorny challenge – how exactly gas stations should be transformed in the light of the needs of the world with constantly falling oil prices, growing environmental requirements and the upcoming emergence of unmanned vehicles.

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IT is an indispensable tool in the supply chain management

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On 05.04.2016

In Gas station chains - non-fuel businesses, RusHOLTS

You get nowhere without IT. Information technologies are so closely intertwined with all the business processes of transportation and logistics companies, that even coffee machines monitoring is implemented as an remote solution. Here’s an interview with CEO of RusHOLTS Alexander Kuzmin for the magazine “Technologies and means of communication”, # 1, 2016.

– What the trends in the field of IT and telecommunications are priority for your organization?

– Logistics companies of 4PL level are engaged in supply chain management, they become part of the business processes of partners with whom they work. We organize the supply chain of gas station chains in all aspects that relate to the non-fuel business. Simply put, we supply all the necessary from the goods for sale, supplies, furniture, coffee machines to IT-solutions that automate processes of gas station’s daily operations. Gas stations chains as a retail object have a lot of features. Each store by itself is small, but the scale of the chain may be hundreds or even thousands of stations. The total number of chain’s cafe and store items is about 3000 SKU (items’ ID), the station may make an order starting from 500 rubles worth. And everybody can imagine Russian distances very well. The organization and supply chain management in these conditions are a heavy task requiring a lot of masterhood which is impossible without IT.

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Private label goods – a trend in demand by gas stations chains

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On 11.03.2016

In Gas station chains - non-fuel businesses, RusHOLTS

How we started to work with the products under the brand name of our private label, how we were developing this direction and what conclusions we’ve drawn. >>

This material includes, perhaps, a one fifth part of the story, so the full version is available to read in the blog.

We’re thanking the magazine “Trick of the trade”, which gave the opportunity to speak out on the important subject for us. Because the private label goods for hypermarkets and private label goods at the gas stations require a different technology to be applied, pursue different goals and objectives, have different pricing and so on and so forth. We’ve said it and we will repeat it for 100-500 times. Those who have already realized this, please, do not be offended.

In terms of shopping malls business, RusHOLTS is now among the five largest suppliers of automotive products for the relevant departments of the federal hypermarket chains. We started off developing our business in the 90s by supplying chemicals and auto cosmetics. In the Russian market we were the official representatives of world’s two huge brands – Holts and Redex. At that time in our country there was no hypermarket chains and gas stations chains have only been planned to start manage its shops on a unified and centralized basis. Then there was 1998 defaulted payments crisis.

The people stopped buying expensive imported car cosmetics, but no one refused from the use of the cars and their quantity only grew. Then we decided to create our own full-scale range of chemicals and auto cosmetics from fluids and fuel additives to polishes and air fresheners. So that niche of autochemistry saw import substitution by Russian-made goods as early as in 1998. Many well-known brands in this direction became the history since that time. Products created by us were unified under the umbrella brand EXPERT.

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