What’s in Your Price Book (Eagles Landing Travel Plazas—Part 3)

When Eagles Landing Travel Plaza experienced a period of rapid growth, they turned to SSCS software to keep their price book in line.

Note: This is Part 3 of a three-part profile of SSCS customer, Eagles Landing Travel Plazas.

Part 1 describes Eagles Landing’s market, their successful approach, and the price book challenges of rapid growth.

Part 2 focuses on the price book control Eagles Landing realized after upgrading to a Gilbarco Passport POS working in conjunction with SSCS software, Central Price Book being a particular focus.

What we’ve yet to cover is the efficiency with which the ten Eagles Landing stores went from using an archaic POS and a limited back office, to their new, improved SSCS/Gilbarco technology platform. That’s what we’re going to do now.

The tone for the conversion was set from Day One by owner Mark Yardley’s total commitment to the changeover.

“Mark understood he had to go all in for a transition of this scope,” says Scott Stuart, Eagles’ Landing’s franchise operator. “The unexpected will happen, but if you perform your due diligence and craft a detailed plan, the unexpected can be kept to a minimum.”

Eagles Landing’s methodological planning made them a natural partner for SSCS, which takes its own meticulous approach to onboarding stores. Established, standard procedures for customer care before, during, and after an SSCS installation are tested over and over in the field, adjusted when needed, and documented for the SSCS sales and support departments to use.

“In terms of the upfront work we do, much of it is setup that is performed before the store goes live with the new technology—for example, defining departments and converting the price book,” says an involved SSCS Sales Representative. “It’s taking the busy work out of the mix for the customer, so store employees can spend more time working live with the system.”

Littlefield, Arizona was the first Eagles Landing site designated for the change. The plan was to use the technology for 30 days, starting in December 2024. An evaluation would be made after that whether to go forward, but really, it only took the Eagles Landing team a fraction of the time to see the potential.

“They knew they were leaking revenues, but when the software got installed, they saw the holes were, in some cases, bigger than they thought,” adds the SSCS sales rep. “A scanned item might display a cost of $2.89 while being rung up for sale at $2.49 at the register. They considered the potential savings multiplied across all his sites and got pretty excited.”

Profit seeps out of manually managed price books in many ways besides outdated shelf tags. Handheld scanning helps by catching discrepancies on DSDs. Central Price Book flags additions and changes that come from importing EDI files into the system.

The SSCS/Passport combination also imposed discipline at the POS. For one thing, clerks no longer had the leeway to ring up items in an obscure or poorly defined way, enforcing their accountability. The locking in of retail prices at the POS and the clarification and standardization of transaction nomenclature are other examples of the Central Price Book’s control.

The Littlefield installation proved its feasibility within the 30 day period with some tweaks to processes. Eagles Landing now had a procedural template they could continue to develop as they added other stores and learned more in the process. That a second site was converted as soon as January 2025 speaks to how well the repeatable procedure worked from its inception.

Over the next six months, all ten sites were brought up to speed. SSCS remained heavily involved for the next few, with Eagles Landing eventually taking over and handling most of the onsite work themselves.

With an enterprise price book now up and running, for the first time the management team had access to real-time, side-by-side pricing information from multiple sites.

“It was like we suddenly had peripheral vision we didn’t have before,” says explains Christopher England, Director of Marketing, who also oversees the price book for Eagles Landing. “The new tools gave us a wider perspective and more control. Corporate had one place from which they could analyze and drive pricing, which was another advantage. No one was working in a vacuum anymore. We could make truly informed pricing decisions and it’s made all the difference.”

SSCS is known throughout the industry as having the finest service and support in the industry. We’ve built this reputation in part because of our effort to clarify and standardize procedures for our c-store customers prior to onboarding them. Installations and conversions don’t have to be chaotic. Give us a call at (800) 972-7727 and we’ll explain how.