This article is brought to you by Franklin Electric.
As convenience stores continue to focus on enhancing in-store experiences, many store managers and employees no longer have the time, or necessary experience, to manage the fueling operations. The shift towards prioritizing foodservice, customer interactions and overall store experience means that the technical aspects of fuel management are often overlooked or left to specialized technicians, shared John Sevilla, global product manager at Franklin Electric.
“Maybe 20 years ago, managers and staff knew more about fuel operations on-site,” said Sevilla. “But now, managers are focusing on foodservice, helping customers and experiences inside of the store. They’ve lost some of the connection to fueling.”
Sevilla noted that many fuel retailers don’t want their front-end staff or store managers interfacing with fuel system equipment when there is an issue because of the complexity of this technology. “They rely on petroleum technicians to come out and fix it,” he said. “This shift in focus has highlighted another key area for convenience store operators: reducing maintenance costs.”
To address rising maintenance costs, fuel retailers are evaluating solutions that offer enhanced remote monitoring and control of their fuel systems for their operations teams. “They need fuel system and building controls with remote control capabilities that help bring down assets back online faster, increase uptime, and reduce maintenance expenses,” Sevilla said.
Franklin Electric’s Power Integrity Remote Control Solution (RCS) with Oversite™ allows convenience store operators to create an integrated network between critical site assets. Sevilla explained that through this network, operators gain the ability to monitor equipment status for outages and initiate power cycling sequences to bring assets back online without a maintenance trip charge.
“Franklin Electric has been working to have more oversight in our products. And to us, more oversight is not only the ability to detect an issue, but actually act on it and help resolve it,” Sevilla said.
This is part one of a two-part series. Learn more about the RCS here.