How process-led pricing helped Australian fuel retailer unlock margin and agility

Discover how one Australian retailer replaced manual guesswork with strategic automation. Gaining control, confidence, and better margin without sacrificing volume.

How process-led pricing helped Bowser Bean unlock margin and agility

The result

Instant insight:

“With our old systems, a margin report could take weeks to compile,” Haydn shared. “Now, it’s literally at my fingertips. One click, two seconds, and I’ve got all the insight I need. It’s a major leap forward for us.”

Smarter volume–margin balance:

With a clear view of competitive positioning and business impact, the team can make informed trade-offs. Often improving margin without sacrificing volume.

“With Kalibrate, we can clearly see the trade-off between volume and margin,” says Haydn. “Before, it was all based on gut feeling. Now, with the What-If analysis, we can understand if our pursuit of margin is costing us too much volume, and where we’re comfortable sitting.”

Jane added, “We’re far more aware of our position in the market and how far we can stretch to gain volume or protect margin. Kalibrate has definitely improved our outcomes.”

Speed that drives performance:

Pricing updates go live in minutes, not hours, enabling fast, consistent reactions to market shifts, boosting both agility and profitability.

“With our old processes it could take hours for price changes to take effect,” says Haydn. “With Kalibrate, we can make pricing decisions and get those prices to the pumps in the time it takes to get a coffee. That agility has made a huge difference.”

Jane concludes; “Kalibrate solved the challenges we were trying to fix — and then some. We’ve used the system to continually develop our pricing strategy and it’s taken us further than we thought possible.”

Find out how Kalibrate Fuel Pricing can help you to gain more market insight, act quickly with confidence, and improve volume and margin performance.

Speak to Kalibrate today

The background

Bowser Bean Café, also known as Vantage Fuels Pty Ltd, operates 35 locations across Victoria and New South Wales, with a network spanning 800 kilometers from north to south.

Led by husband-and-wife team Haydn Tierney, Managing Director, and Jane Tierney, In-house Counsel, Bowser Bean is known for delivering high-quality service with competitive pricing.

The challenge

As In-house Counsel, Jane oversees legal, risk, and compliance matters. When reviewing their original pricing processes, she quickly identified inefficiencies that left the business exposed.

“Our pricing system wasn’t broken, but it all relied on people, not process,”

“The strategy was all in the heads of the pricing team. While they knew it inside out, if someone took a holiday or something happened outside of hours, we just couldn’t react properly.”

The team relied on spreadsheets to calculate fuel prices and manual processes to update prices across their network. With 40 sites, this was time-intensive and often caused delays in implementing pricing decisions.

This approach was inefficient and inconsistent, making it hard to maintain a competitive position across multiple locations. The business needed an automated and systematic pricing solution to reduce manual workload, improve agility, and support more strategic decision-making.

The solution

Kalibrate Fuel Pricing helped the team move from a manual, people-dependent process to an intelligent, system-led pricing model. By embedding site-specific rules and automating pricing pushes directly to POS, the business gained speed, accuracy, and consistency, even outside traditional working hours.

One of the first exercises involved confirming and configuring the pricing rules for each site. Jane shared;

“Once everything was in the system, we could see how the rules played out in practice. We were then able to tweak and refine them until they truly reflected our strategy,”

“It was eye-opening to see that what we thought we were doing and what we were actually achieving didn’t always line up.”

Haydn added;

“With our old manual process, we had pricing rules, now, with Kalibrate, we have a pricing strategy.”

Jane continued,

“Two years in, we’re still regularly adjusting our rules to ensure they align with our strategic goals. Kalibrate has enabled us to continually evolve and improve our approach.”

Both Haydn and Jane spoke highly of the support they received from the Kalibrate team.

“I would 100% endorse Kalibrate’s team,”

Jane said.

“They’re a big reason I’m still so actively involved in pricing. From onboarding through to training, we never felt like we were on our own. We always get near-instant responses, and we still have regular meetings to make sure we’re maximizing the insight the system provides. They’ve been truly outstanding.”

Since implementing Kalibrate Fuel Pricing, Bowser Bean has experienced substantial improvements in both their pricing processes and business outcomes.

Time spent calculating and communicating prices has been significantly reduced. Haydn illustrated this with a practical example:

“We often walk to our local coffee shop in the morning. Jane checks the Kalibrate app and sends out new prices while we’re in the queue — and we get confirmations back from the sites before our coffees are ready. It’s that fast. Before, it could take hours for on-site staff to update prices. Now, it’s practically instant. That agility has made a huge difference.”

The system has helped Bowser Bean remain resilient in challenging market conditions. Haydn noted;

“Since adopting Kalibrate, we’ve navigated some of the most competitive and disruptive conditions we’ve seen, but we’ve stayed consistent because we’re so much better informed.”