Stinker Stores, a convenience chain with stores and truck stops throughout Idaho, Wyoming and Colorado, knew it was time to get more agile if it wanted to stay ahead of the competition.
Greater agility would allow Stinker Stores to scale real-time pricing promotion, deploy new in-store applications and begin offering customers unique themed promotions. All that would lead to more revenue and enhanced customer experience.
But there were some challenges to making any or all those goals a reality.
"Our legacy infrastructure, including point-of-sale and back-office systems, made changes complex, time-consuming and costly, with frequent hardware issues requiring on-site repairs," Cory Mooney, vice president of IT, said in an email interview. "It became clear that modernization was essential. We needed to upgrade both our infrastructure across both front and back-end systems with expanded features, unavailable on our current POS."
Stinker, founded in 1936 by Farris Lind, opened its first store — a service station in Twin Falls, Idaho — and now employs approximately 1,500 workers.
The search for a partner
Mooney's team began searching for the best technology solution and the best partner to achieve all its goals.
While the brand had never enlisted NCR Voyix's services Mooney was aware of its digital commerce solutions for the retail industry including NCR Voyix's Commerce Platform via Edge infrastructure.
"We wanted a company that had significant experience in edge infrastructure software specifically within retail. We had not worked with NCR Voyix before, however, we're aware of their capabilities in this sector. After assessing three vendors we decided no one could match NCR Voyix's virtualization, containerization and innovation experience at the retail edge," said Mooney.
The NCR Voyix Commerce Platform delivers cloud-native services designed specifically for retail, featuring a modern microservices architecture that supports growth and accelerates change, according to Scott Guillet, VP, convenience fuel retail, at NCR Voyix.
"It runs the services you need, wherever you need them - in the cloud or on the devices in your stores, at the Edge. With it's open API design, retailers can customize the exact digital ecosystem for their unique needs," Guillet said in an email interview.
Once on board NCR Voyix visited on-site and created a roadmap with agreed goals and timescales. A partnership was formed between the labs at NCR Voyix headquarters in Atlanta and Stinker in Boise, Idaho, ensuring the project would be completed with maximum efficiency.
"We really appreciated their technical knowledge and strong program management leadership," said Mooney.
Due to NCR Voyix's detailed preparation, the rollout process took place with minimal business disruption as the software was pre-staged on virtualized servers remotely, enabling rapid and seamless deployment across the brand's estate.
"Each store could be deployed in a matter of hours; we didn't even have to do these in the middle of the night. When you consider that's front and back-end store systems with full technical integration to third party applications that's quite a feat," said Mooney.
The many, many wins
As the platform is built on edge computing it removes much of the in-store complexity and automates manual processes, according to Guillet.
This allows store associates to focus on front-of-store consumer engagement.
"This not only drives store system performance improvement but also enables a better interaction with customers," said Guillet. "Retailers get a bird's eye view of their customers transaction data so they can offer relevant, personalized offers and experiences. They can also run targeted experiments to test and deploy new applications with confidence to keep a march ahead of competitors."
But those are just two of the many benefits Stinker Stores has achieved.
Since deploying NCR Voyix Edge, which virtualizes the POS system, the convenience store brand has boosted its bottom line and elevated the customer experience through real-time promotions across its store estate.
The benefits of a fully virtualized and modern store environment include:
- Go-to-market agility — Enables marketing and store operations to launch ongoing pricing promotions with comprehensive reporting to make an impact on the bottom line.
- Improved store system performance — Virtualization allows Stinker to run the latest software on its existing hardware, achieving 60% POS hardware cost savings and 80% savings on back-office technology.
- Continuous operations – Removing single points of failure and installing dual-edge servers for software updates and rollback has delivered maximum uptime at the pump and in the store. This new remote support and maintenance is forecast to reduce support tickets by 50% and enhance store resilience.
- Rapid growth – With an agnostic hardware approach from NCR Voyix and the ability to stage a pre-configured virtualized server, store rollout is 70% faster, which is critical as Stinker drives growth through new store acquisitions.
- Future-proof innovation – Integrations within the software stack now only take a matter of weeks, instead of months. Stinker recently launched a new mobile app with loyalty points and integrated Punchh and Rovertown, with future plans for Grubhub and DoorDash.
Keys to success
Undertaking an IT modernization effort that pays off on both the financial side, as well as the customer experience aspect, isn't quick and easy as a brand needs to invest the time to find the right solution, according to Mooney.
After all, making changes to the POS and back-office store systems can be complex, time-consuming and expensive.
"Be diligent when selecting technology vendors, as many offer solutions designed for the broader market, but few are purpose built for retail," Mooney advised. "Convenience fuel retail presents unique challenges, such as widely distributed stores and often unreliable connectivity. It's crucial to go the extra mile to ensure your vendor provides a solution specifically tailored to meet these needs."
Guillet recommends brands be open minded when undertaking IT modernization.
"You may want to maximize the lifespan of your existing hardware to reduce replacement costs or explore launching third party applications at the edge. Our flexible, open software platform is designed to seamlessly integrate with an existing tech stack, providing ample opportunity for growth," he said.