Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) fuels PDI’s next-generation loyalty programs
PDI uses OCI with Oracle Autonomous Database to build fuel rewards programs for national fuel brands and local gas store owners.
“We wanted to make our network of gas stations a reward destination by giving consumers more choice. The program needed to be simple for those gas stations to operate and compelling for consumers to join. OCI has helped us achieve our strategy by rapidly onboarding gas stations and partners into our network and providing valuable customer insights to improve loyalty and sales.”
Business challenges
Of the 100,000-plus gas stations across the United States, roughly 65% are independently owned under a patchwork of local groups, each with different point-of-sale equipment, product mixes, and customer loyalty programs. PDI Technologies (PDI) is on a mission to stitch these stations together to give major fuel brands, as well as independent owners, a much better loyalty solution—one that offered the kinds of fuel and convenience store rewards that shoppers want. But it would need to be simple for gas stations to operate and compelling for consumers to join.
Originally, PDI physically installed a device in each gas station to onboard the location into the loyalty network, requiring a lot of resources and time to install and maintain the hardware.
OCI’s Integration services seamlessly connects 4,200 new locations in minutes versus a process that previously took 6 to 12 months.
Why PDI Technologies chose Oracle
PDI chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for an integrated suite of reliable and secure services to attract national partner brands. The services help to automate many IT processes, enabling the company to rapidly grow without having to staff and support IT systems.
OCI Integration services automatically connects disparate and legacy POS systems, eliminating the hardware device on the gas pumps, accelerating onboarding gas stations and growth opportunities.
Additionally, Oracle Autonomous Database applies machine learning that eliminates complex maintenance activities such as provisioning, indexing, patching, and back up, as well as autoscaling capacity for peak processing performance and to save costs when idle.
Combined with Oracle Analytics platform and the agility of OCI Kubernetes Engine (OKE), PDI staff can track daily POS fuel data from the pump and packaged goods sales data inside the convenience stores with customer segmentation and prediction models to create targeted promotions and measure marketing campaign effectiveness.
Oracle Autonomous Database supported PDI’s growth from 2,500 locations to 12,500 and 2,500 daily peak transactions to 350,000 with zero database administration.
Results
With OCI, PDI added another national fuel brand, to become the only gas station loyalty provider in the U.S. with two fuel brand customers. PDI rapidly grew in-network gas stations locations from 2,000 to 12,500 and scaled daily peak transaction processing from 2,500 to 350,000 while continuously introducing new loyalty programs, promotions, and partnerships and deeper insights that all of its customers and partners demand.
The Oracle cloud-based integrations enabled the loyalty network to seamlessly onboard and connect the thousands of new locations in minutes versus a process that previously took 6 to 12 months.
The Oracle modern data platform’s autonomous database and analytics helped PDI reduce time to market and to scale and eliminated database administration such as provisioning, tuning, securing, and patching. For example, the cloud-based autonomous data warehouse processed initial daily transactions of 2,500 with 500X scalability in minutes to support campaigns in a moment’s notice with loyalty program partners that have millions of members. Instead of PDI hiring more database administrators to support its rapid growth, the loyalty company staffs higher skilled data scientists who can take advantage of the robust data warehouse and visualization tools to experiment with marketing campaigns in days compared to weeks or months with manual spreadsheets.
Additionally, PDI’s fast growth and success led to a strategic decision to buy the source code of its third party loyalty program engine for greater control and migrated it from the open source PostGresSQL database to Oracle Autonomous for transaction processing and mixed workloads in two months for a single cloud tenancy that further reduces administration and increases security, which is critical for the oil industry. PDI also increased availability and disaster recovery by using multiple Oracle cloud data centers across regions and Oracle Data Guard for complete failover and redundancy.
With machine learning logging analytics from Oracle Cloud Observability and Management, PDI monitors the increasing amount of data being ingested into the loyalty network and across its multiple systems in real-time and with event notification.
Oracle CX Advertising and Experience and OCI enables PDI to quickly create microservice sites to engage customers while at the pump and prompt them with a promotional text message to visit inside the store. The integration with Oracle CX Applications and OCI resulted in developing, testing, and implementing new capabilities in days that used to take six months and disrupt the entire platform.
About the customer
PDI is on a mission to tap into the data from the myriad of point-of-sale systems used by the diverse companies that own and operate gas stations across the US to offer fuel rewards programs on a national level.