Jun 09, 2025
Lessons from the Field: Reducing Risk with Integrated Compliance and Maintenance
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Panel Recap: How Top Operators are Evolving Environmental Compliance & Maintenance Programs
Reading Time : 5min read
Recently, we sat down with two Titan Cloud customers to explore the connection between compliance and maintenance as both a liability and an opportunity. While the link can present risk for fuel operators working with manual maintenance processes and data silos, it can be an advantage for those who centralize their data and use automation to maintain uninterrupted operations and environmental monitoring.
Here are some highlights of our conversation with Andrew Marvin, Environmental Manager at Jackson’s Food Stores, and Joe McCormick, EHS Director at Chestnut Market. Titan Cloud Senior Solutions Consultant Brent Puzak moderated the panel.
Manual isn’t scalable
Both Marvin and McCormick highlighted rapid business growth as a catalyst for adopting automated technology. Reliable, integrated solutions, they agreed, are critical when it comes to scaling a retail fuel business and unifying systems across sites.
“Prior to adopting Titan Cloud, we were basically tracking everything on spreadsheets, which is common. But obviously that becomes challenging,” said Marvin. “Excel isn’t really meant to be a database, especially when you need to track many different fields of data—not just dates, but also facility ID numbers, addresses, fuel system data, tank status. It made it very difficult to manage our data effectively and started to become a problem as we grew.”
“Similar to what Andrew said, we had a lot of manual entries—lots of checklists, inventory reconciliation on spreadsheets—that all lived on separate computers at our locations,” added McCormick. “As you scale up, you can only cover so much ground in a car or over the phone or by e-mail. With connectivity, you can identify that you have maybe 250 locations, but six are out of tolerance, and you have three alarms that you need to deal with today. That was the main reason we evolved from manual entry stations that operated individually into a connected aggregation of data.”
Make the case for leadership buy-in
Growing quickly, both Chestnut Market and Jackson’s Food Stores need to cover more bases across larger areas. At the same time, the industry was, and is, seeing more regulatory presence. Given the landscape, both panelists were able to effectively demonstrate the value of technology to decision makers in their respective companies.
“When we first started, we were doubling in size twice a year, which brought increased regulatory pressures. Rather than get into an exchange with the EPA, the DEP—all the regulators, we just decided, hey, let’s prove that we can do it better than they could. Let’s understand the rules better than they do and let’s fix everything before they get there,” McCormick said. “I did a calculation based on total man hours, expenses, fines and attorneys versus the cost of a proactive program and was able to show a significant cost savings.”
“For us it was pretty straightforward,” added Marvin. “With the rapid growth we had, it boiled down to either hiring a lot more people or leveraging technology to make the processes more efficient with less people. Obviously, hiring people has its risks—if you can even find people who want to work, which is certainly a challenge nowadays. We opted to leverage technology to be able to make our processes more efficient, and it’s basically enabled us to manage over 400 locations in multiple states with just two people.”
Inspections are getting tougher
Looking ahead to the next few years, both panelists predict that increased monitoring will continue to impact the downstream fuel industry from both a compliance and maintenance standpoint.
“We’re definitely seeing much heavier regulatory oversight at all of our sites, including increased inspection frequency,” said Marvin. “We’re also seeing more enforcement action on minor issues that in the past you were allowed to correct; you’re no longer really allowed to correct without getting penalized. It’s really made it more critical to prepare for inspections to make sure we’re catching anything obvious.”
“The cost of running a gas station on the environmental side is going to increase because of the compliance requirements, which will increase the maintenance requirements for systems to stay compliant with whatever the current regulation is,” added McCormick. “But everybody’s looking for ways to minimize cost and optimize their operations and keep up with maintenance in the most cost-effective manner possible. The adoption of technology allows them to do more with less—to get better visibility into all associated costs so they can further drive their business forward.”
Catch a recording of the full conversation on-demand. And if you want to learn how Titan Cloud can optimize your compliance and maintenance systems using fuel analytics, give us a call.
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