Scheidt & Bachmann's third "Experts Panel" explores digitisation of forecourts

"Digitisation - Opportunities and Challenges for the Fuel Retail Industry" was the topic of the presentations and discussions at Scheidt & Bachmann's third Experts Panel on September 11.

Hans Jürgen Krone, editor-in-chief of the magazine Convenience Shop, guided the participants through a lecture programme that studied tomorrow's digital trends and the possibilities of creating their own USPs in the fuel retail segment.

The dinner speech by Christian Warning, Managing Partner of The Retail Marketeers, on the eve of the event bolstered this idea: USPs do not necessarily need to be digital to stand out from the competition.

Jörg M. Heilingbrunner, Managing Director of Fuel retail solutions at Scheidt & Bachmann, opened the lecture program as host, responding what "Always On" means mean for them in today's digital world. Gerhard Göttert, CIO of the Autobahn Tank & Rast Group, highlighted the current megatrends and their influence on new technical developments at Tank & Rast.

Four drivers were used by Andre Stracke, Head of the Petrol Station Business at Westfalen AG, to demonstrate how the company improves its customer experience and responds to changing customer needs. The new gastronomy concepts were a highlight, with their own branding and fresh look.

Founder and managing director of evopark GmbH, Tobias Weiper, gave the attendees an insight into modern mobility concepts in the parking sector. Through digitisation, parking tickets will become a thing of the past and multi-storey car park a mobility hub in the city centre. With digitisation new business models emerge that can be transferred to the filling station industry, especially in cooperation with automobile manufacturers. The presentation by Mark Wohltmann, Director NACS Europe, gave a global overview of the changing needs of our society. He pointed out that digitalisation has an increasing influence on our everyday lives and that our behaviour patterns are changing in a sustainable way. New requirements are being placed on modern convenience retail concepts, which must adapt much more strongly to the needs of customers.

Finally, Dr. Michael Lenders, CTO Fuel retail solutions of Scheidt & Bachmann GmbH, gave presentation on the new orientation of the company towards agile working methods. The aim of this change process is to achieve significant added value for customers by deploying new software functions at shorter intervals and also increasing the quality of the software through continuous integration and testing processes.

The conference participants agreed that strong partners are needed to implement the digitisation goals.