Reimagining Affordable Energy with Leitner Mineralöle
Leitner Mineralöle prides itself on affordable and simple-to-access energy services.
To help them stay ahead of the competition, we developed a data monitoring and adjustment solution that reduces manual work and ensures their customers always get a better deal.
About Leitner Mineralöle
Leitner Mineralöle is an energy service provider headquartered in Graz, with a strong market presence across southern Austria.
The company runs more than 40 automated fuel stations and offers auxiliary products and services such as fuel oil, non-liquid fuel sources (wood, coal), solar energy solutions, and car wash.
Leitner is strongly focused on technological and digital transformation, all while maintaining a brand as an affordable and easy to use fuel station service.
Leitner Mineralöle at a glance:
- founded in 1953
- over 40 stations in Southern Austria
The Challenge
For Leitner Mineralöle, a competitive pricing process is crucial to their operations. The fuel market is highly competitive, and their brand identity relies on offering affordable fuel. Therefore, regular, precise, and agile price adjustments are essential.
Reactive Approach
The process was initiated by employees ad-hoc, so key market shifts could go unnoticed, leading to potential losses.
Risk of Human Error
The manual nature of the process, relying on data from various sources, increased the chances of mistakes.
In order to overcome these challenges, Leitner needs a more streamlined process that can keep up with the fast-paced fuel market.
The Solution: A cloud-based platform that streamlines the entire process by automatically checking data, alerting to market shifts, and suggesting changes.
First, we ran a joint design-thinking workshop where NETCONOMY consultants worked with the Leitner Mineralöle team to define the problem and prototype potential solutions.
Based on these findings, we designed and implemented an online dashboard with two main goals:
- to speed up the process
- enable better control for the Leitner employees.
Project Highlights
Market Monitoring
- The solution automatically scans and saves the market data in configurable intervals.
- This new solution is not only faster and requires less work, but it also improves reaction time to market shifts.
Recommendations for Action
- The dashboard includes a recommendation system for adjustments.
- The recommendations are based on fixed rules and data, which simplifies the calculation process and reduces the chance of human error.
Fully-Scalable Solution
- The new solution was built on top of a ‘Data Lake’ allowing Leitner to unify data from different sources.
- This approach allows easy addition of new Leitner stations and market competitors.
- It serves as a perfect foundation for further automations and setting up analytical and machine learning capabilities.
Technical Foundation
- Google Cloud Platform
- Google Cloud Run
- Google Cloud Firestore
- Google Cloud Scheduler
- Archibald frontend (NETCONOMY solution)
- Nextcloud