Company seeks to make changing fuel prices easier for retailers

Skyline Products Inc., long known for its signs that display “amber” alerts and traffic information on highways and gasoline prices for retailers, is trying to foster a new market for software it has developed that manages fuel pricing for convenience stores and other retailers.

The Colorado Springs-based company spun off its software operation, which developed the software to change prices on its signs, into a separate division earlier this year after finding convenience store chains wanted to buy the software as a stand-alone product, said Aaron McHugh, the division’s manager. Skyline expects revenue from the division to double this year and produce bigger profits than its sign business, he said.

“When we began developing this software 6½ years ago, most convenience stores didn’t have an Internet connection and most of them were still processing credit-card transactions through a dial-up modem,” McHugh said Monday. “We used to have to tell customers at that time why they should automate, but now we just have to tell them about our product and convince them it is the right answer to solve the problem they are having” changing fuel prices efficiently.

The software is designed to allow store managers to input prices from nearby competitors that are then combined with information from the chain’s accounting system on current fuel costs and individual store sales of each grade of fuel and the company’s pricing strategies to come up with prices that generate the most profit for the chain, McHugh said. The system is designed to work with most cash register software, pumps and signs to change prices instantly, he said.

“We have had potential customers tell us that they are lucky to get prices changed in a third of their stores in one day. This can do it all in one morning,” said Greg Stadjuhar, Skyline’s vice president of sales and marketing and co-owner with his brother, Chip Stadjuhar. “We have been doing software for our traffic signs since the late 1980s, so we didn’t think it would be that big a jump to do it on the fuel side as well, though it turned out to be a bigger challenge initially than we thought.”

The company hired software industry veterans John Keller and Quentin Goin last year from the local office of software developer Serena Software Inc. to work with customers to tailor price management systems to meet their needs. The software, called PriceAdvantage, sells for about $2,000 a store and is used by chains such as Royal Farms and Sheetz.

The software division currently is a small part of Skyline, employing seven and generating about 4 percent of the company’s revenue, a number it doesn’t disclose. The rest of its revenue is nearly evenly split between traffic and fuel-price signs, Stadjuhar said. The company, which was started by Stadjuhar’s father, Robert Stadjuhar, in 1970 to fix neon signs, has grown to 180 employees and occupies a complex of six interconnected buildings in southeast Colorado Springs.

Skyline’s traffic sign division also is introducing on Tuesday a solar-powered automated rotary sign designed by Houston-based engineering firm Walter P. Moore to notify drivers of traffic accidents and closures on highways. The company produced 94 signs for the Texas Department of Transportation and is now marketing them to other states as a low-cost option that doesn’t need electricity or a fiber-optic connection that more advanced electronic signs require.
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