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Ditch the Sheet Show: Embracing Automation and Eliminating Inefficiency

A Fortune 500 Fuel Supplier was stuck balancing between excel and their ERP when analyzing over 40,000 data points daily to set prices for its gas and diesel products. Learn how CHS moved from manual to automated to achieve:

  • Speed and Efficiency
  • Pricing Accuracy and Strategy Refinement
  • Margin and Revenue Improvement
  • Resilience and Mobility

Full Transcript

ROSS WINEGAR: Well, thank you everybody for coming here today, my name is Ross Winegar, it's good that you're here the last few minutes at the conference. I'm a data scientist at PROS, I've been here for about 10 years. I worked a lot with our airline solutions and I still get called into that quite a bit. And I also help with our oil and gas which Shane is part of and as well as science enablements and helping customers understand how to better use our science. And so I've known Shane here for four or five years or so I think since starting in the pre-sales and then with the kickoff implementation and then continuing to help innovate and improve the product as we go. So that's enough of me, I think. If you guys have questions from the audience please speak up and we'll answer them. So I have 10 questions that I'm going to go through here and the first one is the probably the easiest, the introduction for Shane. So if you could please tell us about your background and role at CHS....

Shane Mayer: Sure. My name is Shane Mayer. I'm the refined and renewables pricing manager for branded fuels, I work with CHS Inc, been with the company for 25 years. As of last week I started out working in commodity trading, working with some of our commercial and producer customers trading grains, livestock and energies, from there I moved up to the energy world started there as an account manager working with some of our branded accounts and then I actually started a training program for the sales team, and from there I moved into my current role doing pricing for all of our wholesale gasoline and diesel products.

ROSS WINEGAR: Very cool. Alright so we heard that yesterday someone had 10 questions and they went through the 10 questions in 10 minutes. So we're going to try to expand this out a little bit longer. But question two here so could you provide a company overview of CHS?

Shane Mayer: Sure. CHS Inc. We are fairly unique in our space because we are a cooperative, we are a Fortune 100 company. We are a global agribusiness cooperative as I mentioned focusing mainly on energy, grains and agricultural inputs. We have about 10,000 employees and we're based in the state of Minnesota, and on the fuel side we do own two refineries, we sell about 200 different gas and diesel products at about 150 locations and we do have two lines of business, a branded side and an unbranded side and my team would be doing all the branded pricing and I lead the team that sets about 3000 prices a day.

ROSS WINEGAR: Yes, 3000 prices a day and we're going to get in this a little bit, but what was life like before PROS? What systems were in place and how did they hinder your efficiency?

Shane Mayer: Well, I've noticed kind of a theme throughout a lot of this week that a lot of people mention Excel and the heartburn that, that provided and we're in the same boat there. I mean, we built basically everything in-house, we had no front end pricing system with our ERP. So everything we did we built ourself, we actually had some pretty cool things that we were doing with Excel, but just with the complexity of how markets became the product slates and just the volatility we really kind of maxed out with what we could do with Excel. I do have a pretty small team and it was extremely manual in terms of how we would get things in and get things out and then very time consuming and with a small team most of our time was spent on executing and not really spending time focused on value-add, I would say.

Shane Mayer: So really we just kind of maxed out the potential of Excel for what we use it for. So the actual process we had several inputs that we would put into our files, basically we had three large Excel files one for each of the analysts. And so we're individually all pulling data out of our ERP. We had multiple vendors that would send us our competitor prices, so all those pieces were pasted into our Excel file, and then the refresh process with Excel and that's when we would actually start doing our daily job of pricing, we did have formulas that would help guide us if you will on some of our primary products, but again with the limitations of Excel, with all those other smaller products there was just no way we could have effective formulas to help price those products, so really I would say on 75% of our price items it was all mental math and manually keying those prices in every day.

Shane Mayer: So if a person was in a hurry or he just plain forgot, the risk level there was pretty high of something not getting done right. And then there weren't real great I'd say checks and balances, so if you keyed in, let's say, you wanted a price to go up 50 points and you accidentally keyed in it up a nickel really there wasn't any good way to catch that until the price went live, so a lot of risk there. After we went through and did all of our manual adjustments then we had to push everything back into the ERP and I don't remember the number involved but it was something like 45 separate copy paste that we had to do to get all of our prices that we created in Excel back into our ERP. So very manual process, a lot of risk there. And I know one of the big value adds that PROS brought to us right out of the gate was really the time savings to where I estimated total time for all the team about 10 hours a day across everybody added up just to get our pricing done. And that doesn't include any cushion for fixing 911's or something breaks or if you have people on PTO, that really became a big deal for us.

ROSS WINEGAR: What happens when someone goes on vacation?

Shane Mayer: Well, it was not a good situation, you could do it with two. But if one person had to do it which, I mean, it happens really that was your whole day and from the minute you got in the door until our cutoff and when our prices had been released your heart was pounding, if everything flowed fine you're golden, but you had no time to do anything else but make sure at 3:30 when our batches for our prices kicked off that you had to have everything in there or else it was pretty nuclear, so a lot of pressure.

ROSS WINEGAR: Yeah. So there's value from the science and the price regulations but also just the quality of life and helping with that. So what led your company to seek out a pricing solution?

Shane Mayer: I think all the above were probably the biggest things, we really wanted to move the needle if you will from execution over to the value add, our pricing analysts weren't really analysts per se they were more just data management. So that was really the biggest part of it, and then hitting our price targets more effectively as we all know the commodities and markets in general become much more volatile, and that really just made our misses to our targets wider, so we really wanted to narrow that up a little bit because in our world a lot of what we sell are commodities and most of our customers do have access to other suppliers. So if you missed considerably low on any given day, you're going to sell a lot of product at low margin or negative margin and if you missed high they're just not going to lift you at all.

Shane Mayer: So with that volatility and those wider miss ranges we really saw a behavior of where we were selling a lot of product on days at no margin or negative margin and we really wanted a partner that would help us narrow that miss range knowing it's never going to be perfect but really how do we narrow that variance up to what our target was, mainly just to get margin uplift throughout missing low. At the end of the day that's what it resulted in and it really was wanting to provide the customer a more consistent experience too, so they didn't have to wonder if today we're high tomorrow we're low or whatever, it just, we wanted to flatten that out so we could provide a better service for our customers as well.

ROSS WINEGAR: So this is a little specific to the oil and gas industry but you're selling price at the rack, right? And the big trucks come to pick it up to the stations and they look at your price, right? And they know if you're low that day and they say, "Oh, it's a great deal." And they send over three trucks and they buy you out when you're low and then the next day you price high and they say, "Oh he's high today but he'll be low tomorrow" so they don't buy anything. And then because you price high then you have volume to sell, so you have the price low the next day and they scoop it up. And so all your volumes get end up being sold at below your target margins and below what you want them to do. And so what we did was we improved the accuracy of the prices so that we're now priced more close to where we want to be and eliminated the opportunity to get those really low deals and customers then get trained on that, they see that because there's no if they miss high one day they're not going to miss they're going to be really low the next day then they just start buying when they need the product which is what you want, and so you start to see this shift up where you're selling volumes at your higher margins.

Shane Mayer: Well said. I think another piece of it too is we had a lot of our sales data, our pricing data was all scattered around different cubes and things we just didn't really have one data source to look at relationships to try to understand behavior, things like that. So we could get it but it was all very manual and then if you wanted that same report two weeks from now basically had to start over. So that was a big part of it too is the smart price management was just the insights and tying a lot of that data together so we could understand behavior of our customers, our competitors and really and ourselves. So that was another big piece of it too is just being able to again be analysts and not just focusing strictly on execution.

ROSS WINEGAR: Management by exception.

Shane Mayer: Yep.

ROSS WINEGAR: Okay, during the selection process what stood out about PROS ultimately land on decision to choose the measure vendor of choice?

Shane Mayer: Well, our needs were really twofold. One was to try to help us with the execution side of it, so how do we get our prices from point A to point B and get rid of a lot of that risk and a lot of that time involved. Then also obviously the optimization is how do we price better? How do we avoid those larger misses, how do we com become more consistent? So I think through the RFP process and we had multiple vendors come in and I really think PROS pretty much stood out right away just kind of on what they brought to the table. I think the biggest thing is that they understood our business very well, they work with other gas and oil companies so they were able to really provide a solid use case for us where some others weren't able to do that.

Shane Mayer: They gave us some real realistic targets and what we could expect once we did the implementation and then they kind of showed us how they were going to arrive at those numbers so it wasn't just something you guys were pulling out of the sky but really laid out very nicely on how we would get to those numbers, and those were probably the biggest pieces, and then obviously the science we felt comfortable with what you guys had and how you showed us again what that value of what was going to be very clearly and effectively. So it was a pretty clear cut decision right away once you guys came in and showed us what you're going to bring to the table not only on the pricing side but just the integrations and the automations kind of on that A to B piece too, so it really killed two birds with one stone pretty nicely.

ROSS WINEGAR: Yeah, yeah. Great to hear. I went to them the visit part of the sales cycle in August and I think the weather was beautiful and perfect and then we had kickoff in January. It was a little different but Sam you were there too. [chuckle] Which PROS solutions are you using and do you feel that we have provided you with a competitive advantage thus far?

Shane Mayer: The two parts we'd be using would be the Smart Price Management which would include basically, again, how to get from point A to point B, all the insights that are available through all the data that we are pulling into the system, and then the AI piece obviously that's driving our final prices. So we were able to see, I think, the results pretty quickly, it really changed how we do business, we really weren't focusing all of our time spent on the execution anymore, and if I had to put a number on it if everything went great and you were in the pinch and had to get your pricing done we could probably do everything in 15 minutes now. Not only just the automation side of it but just the lack of having to have everything so manual even with your output just to check your prices and all that sort of thing.

ROSS WINEGAR: Yeah, so kind of the way the wholesale oil and gas works here too is that every day people set their prices and you have 120, I think, products for all the different terminals they sell out at 6:00 PM. And so everybody, all the competitors are setting the prices at the exact same time but they base it on how kind of the market price has moved throughout the day. And so you get the final market call at 2:50 or 3:15?

Shane Mayer: 3 o'clock.

ROSS WINEGAR: And they have to have the prices out the door within 15 minutes, and go to the downstream people in order to approve it and post it and get it actually out there to the customers for that $6 pricing. So the window they have the price in is very tight and so you'd spend for four PROS, 10 hours getting ready for that 15 minute window and then now you spend eight minutes getting ready for that 15 minute and you do it then.

S3: Because really all we were able to do before is we had all those adjustments made throughout the morning or whatever and they were ready to go and then when the markets closed, we would just take one market number and apply it across everything because that's all we could do. Where basically PROS now takes that market move throws it into the science and then the algorithms determine of those 3000 price points how much of that market move should be applied to all those prices based on what is the behavior of all of our competitors and the market situation and all that. So it's doing that in a matter of you said several minutes versus if we had to do that manual and there's just no way we could. So that's the beauty of it is once we do get those market closes, we're able to calculate and create our new prices very, very quickly because of those time constraints that we're under.

ROSS WINEGAR: And so now it's demanded by exception, so now the human comes in and looks at the price list to make sure and sends the approval for it to go out?

Shane Mayer: Yep, and I would say we don't do that a lot. There's always one-off set you want to check or you have to manual override something for whatever reason but generally speaking 99% of the time we're using the prices that PROS is creating and we've vetted things out over the last three plus years that we feel pretty confident that the prices are good and unless we get some red flags that we've got some guardrails set up unless something really is odd we run it straight through with very little intervention, so that's nice too.

ROSS WINEGAR: I promise he's not getting paid to say this.

[laughter]

Shane Mayer: Let's see what time is it back home? They're probably pricing right now, I hope I just didn't jinx.

[laughter]

ROSS WINEGAR: When it comes to implementing new software it can be hard to get your internal teams to buy in. Could you share how CHS handled this process and any useful tips of the audience you may be dealing with the same challenge?

Shane Mayer: Well, one of the earlier sessions I know they talked about implementation on making sure that it wasn't just IT and the pricing people that were involved it was also kind of the operations or what I will call the data owners making sure they're involved. So I think we did a pretty good job of that to where it wasn't just my team, it wasn't just IT but we've got a operations group that kind of owns, if you will, the ERP, owns all of that data. So they were heavily involved from, really, from day one just not only so they knew what expectations were the output but what lift was going to be involved kind of in their laps as we got through the process. So I really think it was that and having them involved in some of the higher level discussions too just so they could see what kind of dollar impact is this going to have.

Shane Mayer: So it wasn't just going to be a a work dump onto people that may not ever touch the system but it was okay, why are we doing this? Kind of what's in it at the bigger picture level too. I will say selfishly for my group we are the power users of it and we understood pretty quickly what the value is going to be not only financially but also just from the automation side of it. So my team is pretty hungry and likes tech and new toys and that if you will. So we were gung ho counting the hours from day one on when we could go live with this thing. So we were very excited, so for my group there was no issues with adoption, we actually did the implementation in two phases, we did the control or the smart price management first because we wanted to capture the value that right way or as soon as we could.

Shane Mayer: And then we did the AI piece of kind of secondary just because again we didn't want to wait 'till everything was done to start using the control piece. So we did it at, we had two Go lives, one was about a year, one was about six months after that. So, we just... Our adoption was great. We do have some read only users in our sales team and it's a mixed bag on how much they use it, but we've had to do some training on them just so they can see what the value of that is. Just I mentioned those data relationships that a lot of the pieces you can pull right out of PROS. Right out of your fingertips, we can't get anywhere else whether it's Power BI and that you can build about anything but with PROS is so much of what we need is just right there. So.

ROSS WINEGAR: Yeah, it's something we hear a lot is data was in multiple systems and now it's all in one place and just that fact that you can access it all there together.
Shane Mayer: I guess, just one goal that we had or one thing that we said had to happen through our implementation is that as it went from my team creating the prices with PROS all the way to our customers. It had to be seamless that the customer wouldn't be able to tell that we did anything, that there wasn't going to be system failures or suddenly the price is all we're going to go up or down significantly. It was going to need to be a seamless end-to-end process. And we spent a lot of time going through testing of our data, of our wonky way of doing business and how that bolts onto PROS just to make sure on day one that the customer didn't even notice. There's a couple of odd ball price items that slipped through the cracks out of 3000, but 99.9% of everything went very smoothly. And I surveyed the account managers on the first couple of Go Live days there, and they actually forgot that we even went live, so that was how seamless it went but we worked hard both parties us and PROS to make sure that happened and we're pretty happy with how it turned out.

ROSS WINEGAR: Yeah, great. So I know we'll have questions at the end, but does anybody have any questions now? Well, topics are relevant.

S3: I do. The market data that you said...

ROSS WINEGAR: Hold up. Hold up. Mic up.

S3: The market data that you were talking about, is that something that you get an automatic feed into the system, or is it something you import on a regular basis like the daily?

Shane Mayer: We get the overnight closing values of the actual official closes because those usually don't come out 'till late afternoon or evening. Yeah, we have all those feeding into PROS directly through FTP file, but when we do those market calls at 3 o'clock, we actually have RPA processes that do it for us, basically robots that do all the mouse clicking for us, we have that fully automated, but it's not a direct feed from the vendor, it's something that we're putting in via spreadsheets, through the RPA, it kicks off at whatever time we've assigned it and it loads everything for us.

S3: Okay. That's all I had.

S4: So you talked about the market price, but do you look at the market... The total market quantity, does that influence the price that you set? If there's more or less quantity on any certain day or week or month?

Shane Mayer: We would probably adjust our strategy for that if we had something... Let's say a location that was significantly short or long and we needed to really move product or we wanted to pump the breaks because we were running out or whatever, we would adjust that through our pricing strategy. It wouldn't be necessarily, "hey, I wouldn't pick up on that," we do have a supply indicator signal that we can use, but at this point, we don't really have good... That's a good enough supply data at the micro-level enough to really use it, but the system would be there to do it.

ROSS WINEGAR: Yeah. Also, the market we're talking about is the spot market, so this is barrels of gas that comes straight out of refinery sold in 25000 barrel increments. And so it's the really big players buying 25000 barrels at a time. And so they're buying the real... And then that influences kind of the smaller, "Hey, I want to buy 8000 barrels", "Okay, how are the big guys selling it?" And so that's the market that we're talking about and that closes, then everyone re-adjust their prices for the next day.

S4: Thanks.

ROSS WINEGAR: Okay. All right let's keep going. So how has PROS been able to work through economic volatility and uncertainty, especially, through the pandemic?

Shane Mayer: Well, I will say just the pandemic work, I guess, it was a stroke of luck maybe at the timing of when we did our implementation, we went live with the Smart price management a couple of days before Christmas of 2019. I had mentioned those spreadsheets that we all knew and loved, and back in the old days, pre-pandemic, we were not remote work at all, so there would be occasionally when a person had to work at home and to try to even open and save those spreadsheets. It was seven to 10 minutes, so if we had to have done the old way during the pandemic would have been a disaster with everybody at home, so just from that alone...

Shane Mayer: PROS was our hero, having everything cloud-based because we basically can do everything remotely no differently than we can do in the office, so that part alone was great. In terms of the volatility, in terms of just the world in general, we obviously saw some historic things during those times in most markets including energies, there was one day, I don't remember when it was, late March, I think of 20, where we were actually selling product for 7 cents a gallon at one terminal, it was an eight cents, I forgot, seven or eight cents a gallon at the wholesale level.

Shane Mayer: So obviously, that was pretty historic. So definitely was challenging, I think for everybody. I think the one nice thing about PROS is that maybe when we were way on the bottom and as we kind of tumbled down and went way back up, a lot of the insights helped us understand what other people were doing, we could really get a good view of behavior that helped us be a little more proactive on what we wanted to do, and I just think the volatility in general too is normally going to make your misses wider, and I just think having PROS as a partner... On any given day, it's going to make your miss narrower and I think through the volatility, it just really heightens the need to have that miss range narrower, certainly it's going to be wider in a lot of times, but it's still going to be much, much narrower, your misses are going to be much better when using AI than it would be doing the mental math and doing it the old way like we used to do.

ROSS WINEGAR: Over all 3000 products?

Shane Mayer: Exactly.

ROSS WINEGAR: Okay. I forgot who it was, but I had someone tell me just yesterday, they went live with PROS in February 2020 and it completely saved their lives, that went home.

Shane Mayer: That was pretty life changing for us too really. Just to be able to work remotely because honestly without it, we probably would have had to go into the office to work. So that would have not been fun but...

ROSS WINEGAR: Still at home?

Shane Mayer: Yeah. We're pretty flexible right now. Hybrid versus... Remote versus office. So we're in a good spot.

ROSS WINEGAR: Cool. So could you share some of the results CHS has achieved since implementing PROS?

Shane Mayer: Well, I think not to belabor the performance of the prices, but we could see very early on after going through the science implementation that the misses, both high and low, significantly narrowed, especially, on the bottom side. I think a lot of it just thinking back to doing the manual part of it, I think the bias, probably of myself included, and our pricing team was probably always to... If you're going to choose how you're going to price, you're probably going to err on the side of maybe being too low which I know is a cardinal sin, but that's going to keep the noise down probably if you price it a little lower.

Shane Mayer: So I think removing some of that bias, you really saw the misses to the bottom almost completely evaporate. And really how that tightened up really led to some pretty solid financial gains, just in our cents per gallon margin that we're making. And I mentioned you guys kind of had the three tiers of what you could expect and we hit those right on the money. So we paid for the system literally in three months because of that. So not only that but obviously the financial gains just of the group.

Shane Mayer: Not spending all their time on execution and playing with Excel files, but really looking for opportunities and using the insights and actually being analysts, I think was a significant game. We're still today looking for opportunities that we can see through some of the price elasticity models you guys have and really finding where those opportunities are, not to make monumental changes, but all those little microscopic changes that nobody really notices they all add to the bottom line. So there's those two pieces. I do think our consistency because of it has obviously been much better too. I think the customer does appreciate that. And I will say the customer 911s and the noise from the customers, there's always a couple squeaky ones, but those have almost all gone away. The feedback we're getting from our account management team on, "Hey, you're too high, too high", or whatever, that's almost gone away. So...


ROSS WINEGAR: So when you're priced too high, you get a lot of angry phone calls?

Shane Mayer: Yes.

ROSS WINEGAR: When you're priced too low, nobody calls you.

Shane Mayer: That's right. So the daily 911s as I call them, really have gone down to almost nothing. Somebody asked me how many of those did we have before and I don't know, several a day now to several a month probably. So...

ROSS WINEGAR: So in oil and gas, they measure the price by hundreds of a penny which is called one point. So by changing... Getting one extra point of margin, it means I get one hundredth of a penny extra margin in there. And that's hundreds of thousands of dollars, right, for you guys?

Shane Mayer: Yeah.

ROSS WINEGAR: For that. So to say we got 20, 30, 40, 50 points, whatever it is, multiply that times hundreds of thousands of dollars which is just a tenth or a fifth or a quarter of a penny.

Shane Mayer: For us, 10 points a gallon is 0.001 is three million bucks a year. So our margin uplift that we saw was quite a bit more than that. So again, it paid for itself and I think it was less than three months. So there were those pieces and I think it really changed the conversation that we have with our sales team too if they do need to understand why we're doing what we're doing. We're bringing a lot of facts to the table. We can show them all kinds of data driven pieces that before it might have been just because Shane... I have my own opinions on why we shouldn't do something where it really kind of took a lot of that opinion away and now it's mostly fact-based and we can show them those price elasticity models. It's given us a lot more power, I think, amongst the energy group as a whole. Even with our supply team, if we have tank problems where we've got too much product, we need to sell it very, very quickly. We can provide guidance on what kind of price moves we think are going to drive certain volumes based off of elasticity, things like that. So it's really changed a lot of the conversations. And it's again really freed my team up to be analysts. And really it's allowed us to be offensive coordinators now instead of always dealing with more of the defensive side of it, fixing problems.

Shane Mayer: And making sure that you say a little prayer before you price every day if there's no problems with anything. So it's allowed us to focus on what we should focus on and to really manage the prices and across managing exceptions versus having to manage 3000 prices every day.

ROSS WINEGAR: Yeah. Okay, next question. At what point did you realize the ROI you're receiving?

Shane Mayer: Well, again, pretty quickly on the financial piece of it which is always the easiest to measure, but really the time savings too for us was actually kind of a shock. We knew it was going to be much, much quicker, but after we got into our comfort zone, maybe a month after we'd been using everything and knew all the button clicks and had the muscle memory and all that, it's almost like what are we supposed to do now? We went from each person spending...

ROSS WINEGAR: Don't tell management.

[laughter]

Shane Mayer: 3, 4 hours a day now to 15 minutes a day. It's like wow. It took us a little while to... Okay, here's what we should be focusing on now. Let's start working with the insights. Let's understand some of the data that's available to us. Things like that. So that was probably the biggest change management piece we had at my group is just figuring out what to do with your time. We got plenty to do, but it was just a shock.

ROSS WINEGAR: Yeah. So everyone's, "Oh, the AI's going to take my job." Did AI take anybody's job? No, right?

Shane Mayer: Yeah absolutely.

ROSS WINEGAR: You actually, you explained it. [chuckle]

Shane Mayer: Absolutely. Really we're still driving the car. I mean, look back in the old days and we were fiddling for maps, trying to find out where to go and not really focusing on the road. We're now... We've got a first class GPS that's telling us where to go and we're looking straight ahead, trying to find where those opportunities are. We're not looking at the maps anymore.

ROSS WINEGAR: But you actually expanded the team, right?

Shane Mayer: What's that?

ROSS WINEGAR: You actually expanded the team?

Shane Mayer: We still have the same group of people. We're the same amount in our team, but we definitely worked more closely again with some of those other groups that have read only access to our system. And it's just given us a lot more material to have good productive conversations with some people we may not have done before. Because we just didn't have the data or couldn't get it in a timely enough manner to where it was really useful.

Shane Mayer: So one of the other things I think we really just started to dive into recently too now is really drilling down to the customer level. I think we have pretty good ideas of what our competitors are doing, but the customer behavior, I mean, with the system we have, we have the data flowing it all the way down to each invoice line item. So we can have pretty good insights into how our customers buy which customers are we making margin on versus the average? Which ones are we losing margin on versus the average? And then really trying to understand, "Okay, why is customer A... Why are we losing money on this customer? And customer B is the same size, why are we making well above average on this one? And just learning their buying behaviors. And is there something that we can use as a tool to try to pull up some of those low liars, if you will.

ROSS WINEGAR: Fine tuning.

Shane Mayer: There you go.

ROSS WINEGAR: Cool.

ROSS WINEGAR: Talking about your customers, did you have any challenges with customer segmentation and being able to classify your customers to drive exactly what you're talking about?

Shane Mayer: We really don't focus too much on that. In our world, rules or regulations say that we can't price differently by customers say... But we have one... For one price at one... Or for one product at one location, we can only have one price. So, I mean, it kind limits us a little bit.

ROSS WINEGAR: We can't have off rack deals. Right?

Shane Mayer: Exactly. There's no off rack deals unless everybody gets the same deal. It would be at the location level.

ROSS WINEGAR: And that's because CH is the co-op?

Shane Mayer: Well, it's because there's branded Petroleum Marketers, there's agreement rules that as a branded supplier that applies to everybody. On the un-brand side, they can do whatever they want. But my team is all on the branded side, so we're forced to give everybody the same price. So we still look at customers in segments, but it doesn't really change our price so much. It may help change our strategy, but if that strategy does change, it would impact everybody at a certain location for a certain product.

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