.pdf version of this customer profile (94 KB .pdf)

Progressive c-stores drive transaction-switching reliability, savings with Stratus^® ftServer^® system

The bright exterior of a Sheetz convenience store is a welcome sight for people on the go in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, and North Carolina. At about 300 store locations, patrons refuel themselves with freshly made sandwiches, salads, snacks, and baked goods, and refuel their vehicles with well-priced gasoline at pumps sheltered under extended canopies. Consistently introducing customer-friendly innovations has made the Altoona, Pennsylvania chain an industry leader and a roadside favorite.

At more than $2 billion in annual sales, family-owned Sheetz is watched closely by competitors, has been praised for "The Perfect Store" by CSP (Convenience Store/Petroleum) magazine, and has risen to #109 on the 2003 Forbes list of largest private companies in the U.S.

The Sheetz ethic of "Total Customer Focus" is visible across all areas of its operations, extending to the broad choice of e-payments accepted for purchases: including credit cards, debit cards, fleet cards, and its own gift cards. The need to handle these transactions reliably and quickly is a prime reason that the retailer depends on a fault-tolerant Stratus^® ftServer^® system running ACI Worldwide's WINPAY24^TM payment processing application, which together switch EFT transactions to external networks for authorization and settlement.

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Customer convenience meets cost savings

Non-cash payment options account for a growing share of the chain's sales. "First and foremost, it's about completing customer transactions. Sheetz stores are open, and our pumps are on, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year," says Rich Steckroth, manager of business development and e-commerce at Sheetz. "The negative impact on customer service and revenue could be considerable if our EFT switching were interrupted during a peak period, which is why combining the ultra- reliable Stratus server with ACI's proven WINPAY24 application has tremendous appeal."

Adds Steckroth, "Being able to readily achieve the uptime we need makes it practical to handle transaction switching in-house. This also allows us to reap ongoing savings because we don't pay third-party fees to route payment transactions between our stores and the appropriate processors."

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Continuous computing to go

Designed for 99.999% and greater uptime, the Stratus ftServer system instantly affords the protection of fault-tolerant computing to applications based on Microsoft^® Windows^® server operating systems. Sheetz is therefore able to run the ACI WINPAY24 application on the Stratus server without special modifications to safeguard against downtime - such as modifying the application software or performing specialized system management - avoiding the complications and costs of using clustered servers or a proprietary fault-tolerant system.

"The reliability of a fault-tolerant system is an advantage for this application. Until now a fault-tolerant system has not been a technically attractive or cost-justifiable option," says Randy Pielmeier, Sheetz's payments system administrator. "With the Stratus ftServer system, we get the uptime performance of traditional proprietary fault-tolerant technology on an Intel^® processor-based platform that runs Windows applications. And because we have such a solid base for EFT switching, we are in the drivers' seat in terms of supporting more stores and adding new functionality."

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Keeping up with growth

The need to accommodate growth in transaction loads is another extremely important concern, because Sheetz continues to open new locations and to build a sales volume per store that already outperforms the industry average by double or triple.

"During the sales process, we were presented with the results of a benchmark previously conducted by ACI that gave us confidence in the capacity we'd have. We were impressed with the level of proof," Pielmeier explains. Operating on a single Stratus ftServer 6500 system - the model installed at Sheetz - the performance of ACI's WINPAY24 application was benchmarked at over 10 times the highest volume required by any current customer of the software.

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Simply reliable

"Deployment compared favorably with installing a conventional server. Everything has gone according to plan since then, which of course is important for this application," says Pielmeier.

Since going live with the Stratus ftServer system, Sheetz has found managing the industry-standard server to be on a par with ordinary Windows servers that don't offer as much uptime protection. Ease of day-to-day operation also frees up time for the IT staff so they can accomplish more. For a pacesetting c-store chain with the mission "to provide fast and friendly service, and quality products in clean and convenient locations," flawless EFT is an essential part of the roadmap for success.