DCC's mobility operations hub, powering a pan-European retail network

Growing a retail network across Europe is one thing; running it efficiently is another. DCC's answer was a central operations hub in Drogheda, Ireland – and more than a decade on, that decision is paying dividends across 1,100 service stations.

The central hub supports 700 company owned, company operated forecourts and an additional 400 dealer owned, dealer operated forecourts across France, Norway, Denmark, Ireland and Luxembourg. These sites serve both private and commercial customers with everything from traditional fuel and HVO to EV charging and carwash. Together, those sites process around 63 million retail transactions a year. 

But operating at that scale brings complexity. In fuel retail, volumes are enormous, but margins are modest – and the market moves fast. "You have to react to any change within a couple of minutes," says Evrard Fauche, Operations Director of Certas Energy Retail Europe. "That leaves no room for inefficiency." Each market also has its own pricing dynamics, financial reporting requirements and systems. Building a separate operations function in each country would mean duplication, inconsistency and a limit on performance. 

"If each business had built its own IT and finance function, we would have ended up with non-standardised solutions and processes across all countries," Evrard adds. "That would have led to a highly inefficient model, both in terms of cost and decision-making." 

There was also a more immediate challenge. When DCC acquires a retail network, it typically buys the sites only – not the systems or the support functions to run them. Each new market would need an operations function built from scratch.

The solution: one hub, built for scale 

Rather than build separately for each country, DCC built once – and built for scale. In 2014, Certas Energy Retail Europe opened a Central Operations Hub in Drogheda: a single platform designed to absorb any future acquisitions. "DCC had no choice but to build the first one," Evrard points out. "And we chose to make it scalable for the rest." 

The hub's pricing operation sends over 3,000 prices daily – more than a million annually – with 90% requiring no manual intervention. In France, it taps directly into a government website where every fuel site publicly lists its prices, pulling competitor data automatically via API. “Anytime a competitor moves their price, we can react within a couple of minutes,” Evrard shares.

What the model makes possible 

When DCC acquired its Luxembourg business in 2021, the existing operations function came in with high cost inefficiencies When the hub took on the same finance, IT and pricing functions, the annual cost dropped by around 50% – a huge success for the Drogheda team in showing their capabilities. “That's a compelling example of how we drive value,” says Evrard.

For the country teams on the receiving end, the impact is equally tangible. After one recent integration, an MD described it as going “beyond my expectations – we have more tools than ever. It's a new world to us, and it's easier to manage the business.” They had, until that point, been operating without daily visibility of volumes by product, site or day.

The same real-time visibility now supports faster decisions across all markets. During periods of market volatility, the team moves from weekly to daily pricing calls – making live decisions directly from the analytics platform, with every market working from the same single source of truth. 

Built for fuel, ready for what comes next 

The hub was built around fuel retail, but the network it supports is changing – and Drogheda is changing with it. HVO has slotted in seamlessly, managed through the same processes as traditional fuel. EV charging, however, is a different challenge. 

“We operate more than 600 EV chargers across the network and we’ve made good progress on how to manage them with the same level of automation we have for liquid fuel,” Evrard acknowledges. “I'm confident we'll get there.” 

Convenience retail is next on the horizon, with shop operations already running in Luxembourg and plans underway to extend the model to France. The founding logic, though, remains unchanged: centralise the complex, liberate the local, and build for scale from day one. One hub, five countries, and a platform built to keep pace with whatever the forecourt of the future looks like.