Fast-growing Love’s Travel Stops supports store growth with SAP

Oklahoma City, Okla. –- With plans to open 28 stores by the end of 2014, 30 or more new stores during 2015 and 50-plus stores every year thereafter, the 300-plus-unit convenience and fuel chain Love’s Travel Stops & Country Stores needs a robust platform. As Love’s executives explained during a session at the recent SAP Retail Forum in New York, the retailer is turning to SAP to provide that platform.



Love’s strategy is based on streamlining 200 disparate legacy applications to 100 applications based on the SAP HANA in-memory computing platform. Partnering with Capgemini as a service provider, this has included the first rollout of a HANA-based CRM solution, used for advanced customer data analytics with the ultimate goal of obtaining a true 360-degree view of the customer. All solutions are based directly on the HANA platform, except for the CRM system, which runs online.



Love’s is also using the SAP FICO financial management application. Another interesting implementation has been building a truck tire care mobile application on the SAP Mobile platform. The app allows Love’s tire care personnel to rapidly respond to tire repair cases of tractor trailer trucks that suffer blowouts on the road, and then resolve those cases and send service details back to dispatch. The app also connects to the SAP CRM system for centralized tracking of case histories and resolutions.



“We’re biting off the project into manageable pieces,” said Daniel Parkhurst, IT project manager for Love’s.