Open almost always
Many stations never close, so the intervention window is minimal and almost everything happens with the installation in service.
Guide
A gas station is three businesses on the same lot
Fuel supply, car wash and shop. Each with its own equipment, its own criticality, and its own way of losing money when something stops. And on top of it all, a regulated installation that leaves no room for improvisation.
What needs maintaining at a gas station
More than it looks like from outside. The fuel supply installation — tanks, piping, pumps, vapor recovery system, leak detection — is the regulated part and the one with the biggest consequences if it fails. Around it is everything else: the wash tunnel or bays, the electrical installation and canopy lighting, air conditioning and refrigeration in the shop, restrooms, the payment system and signage. Much of it is maintained by different specialist contractors, and that's where the management problem starts.
What makes this sector different
Five conditions that rarely come together anywhere else.
Regulated installation
Mandatory periodic inspections by an authorized body, with records kept. The date isn't set by the maintenance provider.
Scattered network
Stations are spread out along roads, often far apart, which makes every trip count.
Several contractors per station
Pumps, car wash, refrigeration and civil works are usually handled by different companies. Each reports its own way.
The shop staff raises the alert
Whoever notices a pump is failing or the wash won't start is the shop attendant, who can neither should nor be expected to describe a technical fault.
What every stoppage costs, and why it's worth calculating
At a gas station, the cost of a breakdown is unusually easy to estimate, and curiously few networks bother. A pump down at peak hour has a known average sale; a wash tunnel out of service on a Saturday, too. Translating incidents into that currency completely changes the conversation about maintenance, because it turns a discussion about spending into one about revenue. All that takes is one thing: every incident recorded against its equipment and its station, with the real dates it went down and came back into service.
Comparing stations on equal terms
Once a network reaches a certain size, the question of which station spends more than it should comes up, and answering it by comparing absolute spend doesn't work: one has a wash tunnel and another doesn't, one sells three times as much, one dates from the nineties and another from two years ago. What can be compared is spend by installation type, the number of incidents per equivalent unit, and average time to resolution. When every station logs the same way — even the ones maintained by different contractors — those comparisons come straight out of the system instead of depending on someone building a spreadsheet every quarter.
Shall we look at it with your way of working?
Leave your details and we will get in touch to see whether we fit. No commitment, no lock-in period.
Travel time is half the cost
In a network of stations spread along roads, travel time can outweigh work time. That makes the useful planning unit not the work order but the trip: what's pending at that station and the two others along the way, and which preventive visits could be moved up a few days to fit the same trip. It's a call that only gets made well if you can see, side by side, what's open by area and what's scheduled for the coming weeks. When each station is looked at in isolation, you end up driving the same road three times in a month, and none of those three trips looked avoidable at the moment it was decided.
The part that isn't where it's needed
Equipment at a gas station has the peculiarity that its spare parts are very specific and yet very few: nozzles, hoses, filters, keypads and pump boards from a particular manufacturer, brushes and pumps for a specific wash tunnel model. It's not a large stockroom, but it's one where the wrong item means going back another day. What changes things is having consumption history by equipment model: what was replaced, at which stations, and how often. With that, minimum stock stops being set by gut feeling, and the technician heads out with the part they'll probably need, instead of going out to diagnose and coming back to fit it.
Uptime as a contract objective
In station networks it's increasingly common for the contract with the maintenance provider to be measured not in visits but in uptime: what percentage of the time each pump, each wash tunnel, each payment terminal was operational. That shift looks administrative and it isn't: it requires precisely logging the date and time a piece of equipment goes out of service and when it comes back, not just the date of the work order. With those two data points per incident and per unit, the calculation comes straight out of the system. Without them, both sides end up negotiating over estimates, which is how everyone loses: the provider can't prove what they delivered, and the client can't demand what's missing.
Frequently asked questions
Does it cover the installation's mandatory inspections?
They're managed as preventive visits with their own frequency, inspection routine and supporting documentation, so there's a record of what was checked and when. Determining which regulation applies to your installation is up to whoever has the technical authority to decide that.
Can the station attendant open a ticket?
Yes, from their own access designed to describe the problem, indicate the equipment and attach a photo. No technical vocabulary needed, and no need to know the rest of the system.
Does it work with several contractors per station?
Yes, and it's the normal case. Each one logs in through a scoped portal limited to their own jobs and records what was done inside the system, so the station's history stays complete even if four different companies did the work.
Can I see how much each station costs me?
Yes, if jobs are billed against the station and its equipment. And more useful still: comparing by installation type rather than in absolute terms, which is where you see which station is out of line.
Does it work if maintenance across the whole network is handled by an outside company?
Yes. The maintenance provider works inside the system and the network owner keeps the history, which matters when the contract goes back out to tender.
Start with two stations
In the demo we register their equipment and obligations, and see what oversight of the contractors would look like.