Shell’s largest retail station, Berchem in Luxembourg, upgraded with Tokheim’s latest point of sale and payment solutions.

How do you go about replacing the site systems at the largest and busiest Shell retail site in the world without causing any safety risks or disrupting sales? The Berchem site in Luxembourg is huge; and the task to upgrade their systems was equally big. On the busiest days Berchem welcomes more than 1,500 trucks, 7,500 cars and 5,000 customers in the shop. There are 14 Tokheim Fuel POS point of sale systems, 35 Crypto VGA outdoor payment terminals, 5 back office systems and 63 Quantium dispensers operating on 12 truck and 5 car dedicated lanes. Shell Berchem sold 280 million litres of fuel in 2012.

The challenge

As part of Shell’s Global Site Systems Programme (GSSP), Tokheim worked alongside two other selected suppliers, AT&T and Red Prairie, to deliver this complex IT project at Berchem. There were two immediate goals: safety and no loss of revenue. The team needed to ensure that the forecourt would not be down for any period of time due to the HSSE risks involved - if trucks had to wait to get fuel there could be unexpected traffic disruption on the highway which could pose a serious safety risk. In addition, due to the sheer volume of transactions processing on the site, it needed to stay up and running to avoid a substantial loss of revenue.

Planning for the future

Olivier Dandois, the Retailer, said “I got involved in the Berchem deployment project more than a year ago. This has enabled us to review all operational processes and match them with the future system. This timeframe was also used to organise thorough testing of the new system and to develop backup plans. In doing so I was extremely pleased to see the Shell project team taking site suggestions into consideration in order to ensure a smooth rollout.

The entire team spent 5 challenging nights on site to roll out the new site systems. Thanks to this support and hard work from the central and GSSP local teams we managed to implement the change without disturbing the customer flow.”

Olivier added “The GSSP system is new and some fine tuning is still needed, but I am fully convinced that it is a robust platform that will support us, ensuring that every customer leaves the site with a smiling face after every visit.”

Building long-term partnerships

Tokheim has been a key partner at Shell Berchem since the 1980s, and has been involved in a number of dispenser and systems upgrades to the site in the intervening years. As part of the GSSP roll-out, the site at Berchem will benefit from Tokheim’s innovative outdoor payment (Crypto VGA), point of sale (Fuel POS), electronic payment server (e-CIS), and Tokheim’s forecourt controller product solutions. The latest project is one of a number of recent international programmes that Tokheim are involved in - providing cost effective retail IT solutions to complex systems and payment projects.

Joop van der Wal, GSSP Project Manager for The Netherlands, Luxembourg and France said “The most remarkable thing about this deployment was that Tokheim, AT&T, Red Prairie and GSSP acted as one team and focused on delivery. The boundaries between companies were gone during the deployment, everyone was aiming for the same goal – do the job, and get the site up and running in a safe manner.”

The work of the Global Site System Programme further supports Shell’s strategy to be the best fuels retailer in the world. GSSP is helping make Shell easy and reliable to do business with through its modern and safe payment systems. The new site systems support future growth and allow customers to pay using a system that protects them against the increasing threat of fraud.