Fleet Mobile App to Promote Affiliated Gas Stations

Background

Hightowers Petroleum Co., a US wholesale fuel distribution company generating $200M+ in annual revenue, our client has offered a number of services to its customers in North America for the past 50+ years. Their service offerings include, bulk fuel delivery, supply chain management, and fleet fueling discount services through its fleet card program.

Under the fleet card program, the client provides its customers with cards that guarantee an additional discount at any of their affiliated gas stations. However, without any meaningful system and data integration directly between our client and customers’ fleet drivers, the existing implementation of the program left most of the responsibility of program’s success to the fleet drivers and their initiatives.

 

Problem

Spending much of their working hours driving the interstate highways and freeways, it is difficult for the fleet drivers to manually locate and plan their refueling from the affiliate gas stations to take advantage of the incentive. As a result, the program was failing to recoup about 10% of refueling costs for an average of 4,000 – 5,000 fleet drivers, per customer.

When the client engaged us to find a digital solution that help them rectify the problem in hand, we reviewed their business operations and found a number of opportunity areas. However, both, the client and Dimiour, parties agreed that there was an immediate need to improve the usage and efficacy of the fleet card program, and in turn, increase the revenue from the program by enabling easy and timely search/locate features of the affiliate gas stations for the drivers.

Solution

Mobile App

As a first step in the digital transformation, Dimiour partnered with the client to build an easy-to-use mobile app which finds and displays the affiliated gas stations with just a click of a button, then provides navigation to the selected refueling station. 

On the customer specific personalized mobile app, the fleet drivers are able to get locations of affiliated gas stations in a number of simple ways, as they need them: 

  • Text-Based Search: When the driver is aware of the name or address of the preferred gas station, he can use the app to find and navigate to it. 
  • Proximity Alerts: With the alert setup, the fleet driver can be notified of affiliated gas stations in their proximity, as they are driving.
  • Gas Station Near Me: When the driver needs to refuel and wants to locate all the nearest preferred gas station, he can do so by just pressing a button in the app.

The system also enables data sharing from the mobile app to our client to provide the necessary analytics and insights to make continuous improvements on the business decisions, processes, and the overall user experience.

Architecture

AWS Cloud Service

All the app functionalities are managed through the server hosted on Amazon Web Services. Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Amazon Route 53 are used to provide a highly scalable and secure cloud service. The application also uses algorithms to arrive at optimized routes and determine proximity of the gas stations.

Technology Stack

Benefits

  • Increased Usage and Revenue – Additional monthly recurring revenue through 40% increased usage of preferred gas stations bringing in approximately 10% of the refueling cost, per driver, in revenue. 
  • Targeted and Exclusive Marketing Network – The app makes the company’s reach wider, yet more targeted, and creates a portal for it to advertise and connect directly with the end users. 
  • Differentiating Offering in the Market – Benchmark for the company’s digital progress and a vital differentiator in attracting new customers