Powering Journeys Together

The Challenge:

Parkland is an international fuel distributor, marketer, and convenience retailer with operations in 26 countries across the Americas. Each day, Parkland powers the journeys of over 1 million customers with fuel, convenience items, quality foods and electric vehicle charging.

Focused on putting customers first, Parkland’s strategy is based on evolving customer and industry trends. Parkland has prioritized transforming their convenience capabilities and collaboration with vendor partners to better serve their customers, accelerate growth and boost business performance.

Following a period of acquisition growth, Parkland was juggling multiple price books and product definitions across their regions, limiting the ability to deliver actionable insights to internal teams or share data with vendor partners for fact-based collaboration.

In addition, Parkland’s internal reporting tools could not integrate multiple data sources (transactional POS, planogram and loyalty) to inform customer-centric, Category Management 4P decisions. This combination of challenges fragmented their merchandising process and capabilities, leading to planogram, execution and compliance issues that bottlenecked productivity.

The Solution:

Driven by the need to enhance category, loyalty and merchandising capabilities, Parkland forged a strategic partnership with SPS Commerce in 2019. As Parkland grew through strategic acquisitions, the SPS partnership has helped standardize processes, integrate new assets and activate insights to execute Parkland’s commitment to customers.

By integrating and transforming multiple data sources into category management, customer, and operational insights, SPS stimulated collaborative decision-making by connecting Parkland’s cross-functional teams and vendor partners. This made it possible for data to flow accurately through the organization as actionable insights.

SPS Category Management, Loyalty Analytics and Vendor Collaboration Service (1screen)

In addition, SPS revamped the merchandising process by creating a consistent and timely approach to category reviews, planogram analysis, development and delivery.

SPS Merchandising Service (Planogram Analysis, Development and Delivery)

The Result:

SPS empowered Parkland’s category and operations teams to self-serve their insights and drive better assortment, pricing, promotion and space decisions, allowing them to capture localized opportunities. Plus, with actionable insights driving headquarter strategy and retail execution, the operations team could leverage new visibility to store-level performance that prioritizes visits, closes distribution gaps and improves out of stocks.

Beyond giving Parkland’s internal teams the solutions they needed to make more informed decisions, SPS worked to understand the Parkland customer and what drives decisions about the assortments, promotions and programs that Power their Journeys. This gave Parkland an edge by delivering customer-centric insights to the category and marketing teams that helped them engage, retain and grow profitable baskets and customer satisfaction.

Collaborating with the Parkland team, SPS also developed and executed the planogram refresh and review schedule, including assortment to space analysis, planogram development and publishing. SPS transformed Parkland’s planogram process by converting existing planograms to digital format and standardizing naming conventions and planograms to store assignments.

Parkland’s business partners felt the benefits as well. After providing Parkland and their vendor partners with a single source of truth for data-driven decisions around building categories and customer transactions, SPS deployed their proven approach to engage vendor partners, get them onboard and activate insights for mutual business benefit.