What’s in Your Price Book (Eagles Landing Travel Plazas—Part 2)

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

Note: Part 1 of this profile can be found by clicking here.

When dealing with a complex system—an engine, a data center, the human body—it’s essential to have a set of monitoring tools: it’s unpleasant to get blindsided by a problem you didn’t see coming.

A c-store’s price book is a system, too, one that requires its own set of monitoring tools to ensure item records are priced appropriately.

It’s not simple—it wouldn’t be a system[1] if it were—and margin erosion is often missed or easily overlooked. Part of the challenge is that pricing changes come from multiple points of origination: DSDs, POS scans, EDI invoices, and manual entries are prime examples. That these changes often occur quickly complicates things more.

The desire to get a closer, clearer, more timely look at pricing activity came to a head for Eagles Landing Travel Plaza after the organization went through an explosion of growth in 2017. The business now had ten stores operating across six states. The scope and complexity of their price book, as you might expect, had grown accordingly.

“We didn’t have an enterprise-wide view of pricing because our technology at the time didn’t provide it,” explains Director of Marketing Christopher England, who oversees the Price Book for Eagles Landing. “We were communicating changes down to the sites, one by one, which was a cumbersome and inefficient process. Even though our site managers handled it as well as they possibly could, the process took too much time and was less accurate than we wanted.

After researching available solutions, Eagles Landing committed in November 2024 to get started with SSCS Technology, integrated with the Gilbarco Passport POS. A single site was installed for starters and the effects monitored.

SSCS Technology had an impact throughout the store, but for Eagles Landing, the most profound improvement was the control it allowed over their price book. It opened up their view of its detail, making it easier and faster to locate issues and correct them.

The piece of SSCS software doing a lot of the heavy lifting in this regard was Central Price Book, which provided a single point for reviewing pricing activity across the enterprise, allowing item price additions, updates, deletions, and, when there is more than one site, transferal among them.

“We got pricing detail that we never and gained control at the same time,” says Scott Stuart, franchise operator for Eagles Landing. “Central Price Book gave us a more detailed understanding of what was happening in our price book than ever before.”

In addition, the software proved flexible enough to incorporate the pricing impact of modern variables like promotions and loyalty discounts. Their impact on profitability can be hard to discern unless you look at the data over time. Special consumer deals are great but only work when item profitability and transaction counts show that they do.

“We get a historical view of item pricing performance with Central Price Book which is essential,” adds Stuart. “The software also places tools at your disposal to select data views that are most meaningful at the time. It’s nice to be able to zero in on what’s important at the moment.”

After a few months, when store and staff had become sufficiently comfortable with the SSCS software, it was time to start making the transition in other stores. It was no small thing, but necessary—the prospect was too enticing to ignore.

“We planned well, but you know what they say—most plans look good on paper before the work starts,” says Stuart, “but carrying it out in the real world can turn out to be something else entirely,” says Stuart.

Fortunately, Eagles Landing had the necessary approach and support to keep their transition largely on track, which we’ll get into that in Part 3, coming next week.

[1] “An assemblage or combination of things or parts forming a complex or unitary whole.”