Full Throttle at the Petrol Station with team energie

Panasonic is helping to drive innovation in petrol station convenience stores with the deployment of Electronic Shelf Labels. The solution provides a wireless connection to a centralised Point of Sale (POS) system to automatically update the price displays in store - enabling innovative marketing campaigns to drive sales, reduce pricing errors and save staff up to 30 minutes a day.

team energie, with 2,800 employees at 290 locations across Germany, has deployed the first ESL solution at its fuel station in Flensburg, near the German and Danish border. Panasonic Connect engineers worked with team energie’s long-term POS system provider, Huth, to customise and integrate the solution with the company’s backend systems. The 800 electronic shelf labels were then installed and operational in just a single day.

As well as pricing accuracy and convenience, the first installation has proved that labour can be cut by 30 minutes a day using the automated system – allowing staff more time to spend with customers. Increased marketing opportunities are another great benefit. The electronic labels can be customised to display logos, flash special offers or provide more product information. In addition, using NFC and QR Codes, shoppers can scan labels to see special offers on social media or look-up additional information. For example, the Flensberg store uses this functionality to enable people purchasing oil to look-up the right type for their vehicle.

Moving forward, the organisation sees the opportunity to further target its marketing by using transaction data to spot trends and tailor specific offers for customers to be sent directly or shared over social media. Ultimately, the ESL system is also the perfect foundation for the introduction of dynamic pricing, where product costs could change in real-time depending on demand, the time of day or customers in the store.