CALGARY, Alberta — Parkland Corp. is collaborating with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help strengthen its customer value proposition and loyalty initiatives and accelerate its digital transformation. With AWS as its strategic digital provider, Parkland intends to tap into leading expertise in machine learning and analytics to improve its logistics and enable frictionless commerce.
“We are excited to be teaming up with AWS to advance our strategic priorities and support our ambitious organic growth targets,” said Ian White, senior vice president strategic marketing and innovation at Parkland. “AWS is a renowned global technology leader who is laser-focused on customer experience and innovation.”
“Across our growing business in North America, the Caribbean, Central and South America, we complete over one million customer transactions every day,” he said. “Through digital, we will build on this unique perspective and uncover valuable insights into our customers’ needs and preferences to provide enhanced services, products and personalized offers.”
Parkland has been building its internal capabilities to leverage digital technology trends, the company said. To advance its vision for the “convenience store of the future,” it has identified several technologies and customer-centric opportunities that support organic growth: loyalty program data optimization (including the Canadian Journie rewards program) and personalized customer offers, as well as real-time price optimization using enhanced data feeds and machine learning.
Additional strategic opportunities include monitoring fuel inventories in real-time and optimizing routing and distribution, harnessing digital to help scale the business without adding significant cost and complexity and improving the speed and efficiency of mergers-and-acquisitions (M&A) integration.
“By embracing digital, we will strengthen our position as a leading fuel and convenience marketer and believe that through enhanced customer focus we can drive organic revenue growth and margin expansion,” said White. “Digital services are changing constantly and teaming up with AWS helps us channel those developments to elevate our customer focus and enhance our core competencies of retailing, customer loyalty, pricing, supply and distribution.”
- Parkland Corp. is No. 121 on CSP’s 2020 Top 202 ranking of U.S. c-store chains by number of retail outlets.
Calgary, Alberta-based Parkland is an independent supplier and marketer of fuel and petroleum products and convenience-store operator in Canada, the United States, the Caribbean and the Americas through retail, commercial and wholesale channels.
In Canada, Parkland Fuels owns, operates or supplies stations under the brands Chevron, Esso, On the Run, Marche Express, Fas Gas Plus, Pioneer, Race Trac (not to be confused with RaceTrac Petroleum in the United States) and Ultramar. It acquired most of the Canadian business and assets of CST Brands Inc. from Laval, Quebec-based Alimentation Couche-Tard Inc. in June 2017.
Parkland Fuel’s subsidiary Parkland USA has operations in 13 mostly Western U.S. states. Brands include Farstad Oil, Superpumper, Harts and Rhinehart Oil. Along with the new ConoMart Super Stores, its 58 company-owned stores include Superpumper locations in North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Minnesota; Harts Stores in Utah and Colorado; and KB Oil KB Express locations in Utah. It has 324 dealers under the Sinclair, Exxon, Phillips 66, Arco, Cenex and Chevron brands, as well as approximately 42 commercial locations.
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