How to Automate PDI Technologies

Fuel and snacks are one business with two margins

PDI Technologies makes the software fuel wholesalers and convenience retailers run on. PDI Enterprise is the back office, in a retail edition and a wholesale one, and around it sit store systems and point of sale, Retail Site Management, logistics for the haulers, loyalty and payments, analytics, and GasBuddy, the fuel price app PDI owns.

A convenience site is really two shops sharing a forecourt. Fuel is enormous revenue at a margin measured in fractions of a cent, and it exists to get somebody out of the car. Inside, a bag of ice and a coffee carry the margin that pays the staff.

That is why head office lives in a system like this. The pricebook, the inventory, the ledger, the labour schedule and the fuel margin have to be readable in one place across every site, because the difference between a good month and a bad one is a rounding error repeated ten thousand times.

The competition posts its price on a sign, not in a feed

The chain runs on numbers that live outside it, and somebody spends their morning going to get them.

Fuel is the obvious one. The rack price sits on each supplier's own portal, and the competition posts its retail price on a sign at the roadside, which is why plenty of operators still send someone to drive past and look before a price change goes out.

Inside the store it is the same shape with more vendors. Direct-store-delivery suppliers each keep their own portal for invoices, credits and promotional allowances, and reconciling those against what the driver left gets done late or not at all. The lottery commission has its own site and its own numbers, which rarely match the store's count first time. The delivery apps hold a slice of the day's sales that never touched the register.

None of it is hard. It is checking, multiplied by the number of sites, which is why it does not get done.

The pricebook is centralised, the vendors are not

PDI Enterprise automates a great deal of the operation, and a chain should use all of it first.

It runs a central pricebook out to multiple point-of-sale platforms, with inventory control and order automation behind it, so a cost change made once reaches every register. Retail Site Management puts real-time site operations on a phone, which is what a district manager uses. Electronic shelf labels push a price change to the shelf without anybody walking the aisle. Lottery counts calculate in real time and flag their discrepancies. Ledger, payables, labour scheduling and recipe management sit in the same place, and the fuel pricing engine sets pump prices from the data it is given.

That last phrase is the ceiling. Every one acts on data that has already arrived: a cost the vendor sent, a sale the register rang, a delivery somebody keyed.

The pricing engine is only as good as the market picture behind it, and much of that picture is a supplier portal with no feed and a competitor's sign two miles away. Order automation reorders what the system believes is on the shelf, not what the vendor believes it delivered.

The rack, the street and the sign can be read the same morning

The same checking, run across every site before six in the morning, changes what the price decision is made on.

This morning's rack cost from each supplier's portal, alongside the posted price at the competing stations around each site, on one sheet so the price change is made on today's picture. Vendor invoices and credits pulled from each direct-store-delivery portal and compared with what was received, so a short delivery or a missed allowance is found this week rather than in an annual audit.

Then the ones that quietly cost a licence. Tank testing and underground storage compliance dates checked on the state's site, with enough notice to get a contractor booked. Tobacco and alcohol licence renewals watched per site. Lottery figures reconciled against the store's count weekly instead of quarterly. Delivery app dashboards totalled into the day's sales, so the number head office reads is the whole day.

The split is one any operator would recognise. One unattended run can do the fetching, the comparison and the flagging for every site at once. Changing a pump price, accepting a vendor credit and acting on a shortfall are a person's.

A price change still needs a manager behind it

Deciding where to sit against the station down the road is a judgement about volume, brand and what the site can stand. Finding out what that station is charging this morning is not, and it is the part that never happens on time.

WebRun is an AI agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you. It opens the supplier portal, the vendor's invoice site, the state's compliance page or the delivery app dashboard, reads each one, and puts the comparison in front of the person who sets the price.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, restricted to the sites you allow. Nothing is priced, ordered or paid without somebody approving it.

The workflows below are already built, and each one names the systems it opens.