There is quite something special if a company finds out after 135 years that its “second leg”, i.e. Systems for Petrol Stations, is also already 75 years in active business. Although this is a tradition in the system house Scheidt & Bachmann, a family enterprise that is doing business meanwhile worldwide with four steadily growing legs, but there is still an occasion for a look-back to 75 years of technological progress and growing turbulence in an industry that has been clearly influenced by Scheidt & Bachmann is a specialist with many years of experience.

The “Iron Maiden” is today an eye-catcher in many museums. The first dispenser by Scheidt & Bachmann from the year 1932 has two glass cylinders with scale marks for volume measurement, embedded in a cylindrical housing with two curved doors which give the dispenser its characteristic appearance and its popular name.
A great success was the Panorama Series in the 50ies with the first piston meters and a mechanical counter, where the unit price was set manually on each dispenser. The Mix version existing since the end of the decade mixes the desired fuel grade during tapping from several tanks – an absolute novelty and unique feature of that time.
In the Seventies, microprocessors started to revolutionize also the dispenser, by the introduction of the first electronic price computers, which started to receive the unit prices via a cable from an equally new Forecourt control that, in turn, has led to the development of the first Petrol Station Management System in the beginning of the Eighties.
The first integrated Petrol Station Management System TMS 10 worldwide represented the breakthrough in the system business. The network-wide introduction of POS and BOS with inventory control, electronic journal, card payment, etc. was the invention that permitted the expansion of the petrol station business to other items needed by car drivers in excess to the car as such. TMS 20 in the Nineties approaches the management system to the existing PC-technology and is designed to grow continuously with the software.
The current TMS 30 system lets the classical product boundaries disappear from the management systems. In a client/server architecture, the system is hosted centrally, while the applications remain mobile. The BOS is no longer bound to one office computer, the applications are scaleable to a random number of clients.
The growing system business has transformed Scheidt & Bachmann to a highly specialized “software foundry”, but without neglecting the success of their high-quality dispensers. Just the opposite is true: by the latest dispenser generation “Clou”, the dispenser and the system have merged to a virtual all-rounder. From the outside it is a dispenser in a modular design, under the hood there is the intelligence of TMS 30, which together represents so-to-speak the tiniest petrol station in the world.
Today the Scheidt & Bachmann Business Unit “Petrol Station Systems” presents itself as a modern international solution provider with an attractive product portfolio for small and medium-sized companies right up to industrial solutions for large concerns.

The next 75 years may come!