Cumberland Farms had the usual documentation on its stores. Drawings, photos, surveys, facilities notes, and prior project files. Teams accumulated years of property data across drives, folders, and shared systems. Store Planning had one version of a location. Construction had another. Facilities knew things that no drawing reflected. And somewhere in someone's inbox, a site visit note captured a detail everyone else had long since forgotten.
Before any remodel, refresh, or capital decision, teams spent the first phase of every project doing the same thing: trying to figure out what was actually in the stores they were supposed to be working on.
"It was very clunky systems, very siloed. [There was] no one real source of truth for our company," said Jana Rogers, who leads Capital Projects and Program Strategy at Cumberland Farms, formerly known as EG America. "The information we did have was so outdated that you couldn't trust it."
The trust problem sharpened as Cumberland Farms moved through an aggressive acquisition and rebrand strategy, absorbing locations from other operators and inheriting whatever data those organizations had accumulated. The documentation reflected someone else's priorities, someone else's interpretation on what mattered.
"You can't trust it," Rogers said. "It's someone else's opinion of what's there."
Rogers' first encounter with Immersion Data Solutions started with a meeting and a demonstration using real store data. What she saw wasn't a product pitch. It was a mirror: a precise, high-fidelity view of a physical location that her team could zoom into, ask questions of, and trust.
Her mind immediately started mapping what it could do.
"You know what we can do with this?" she remembered thinking. "We can go here, we can go there."
She started small. A few surveys. A proof of concept. What she discovered wasn't just a better way to document stores. It was a fundamentally different answer to the question of what site information is actually for. It's not a project artifact or a one-time deliverable. Site information should be a living, reusable foundation that can serve every team, every initiative, and every capital decision.
The use cases accumulated quickly. A contractor submitted a quote to replace a tank mat at one of Cumberland Farms' locations. Rogers pulled up Phygii and zoomed in to inspect the exact section in question.
"You can see a penny on the ground when you use that tool," she said. "So I know upfront whether or not it's a cost worth spending."
That pattern repeated across dozens of situations. Electrical panel photos that let Rogers check amps and phases for new equipment without dispatching someone to the store. Canopy top conditions that hadn’t previously been photographed because nobody wanted to climb up there. Asset counts she used to do by hand could now answered in minutes.
Each use case built the case for the next one. And Rogers kept asking the same question: who else at the company could benefit from this?
What makes Rogers' story worth telling isn't the tool she found. It's what she did with it.
She set up single sign-on company-wide so that access didn’t have to be routed through her. She put Phygii on every colleague's desktop as a one-click shortcut. She trained people in Marketing, Environmental, and Facilities by showing each person exactly how the data in Phygii could help them solve the problems directly in front of them.
A Marketing colleague wanted to measure store windows for advertising clings. Rogers walked her through the measurement tool on the spot. Environmental staff needed to assess a store with a popcorn ceiling that raised asbestos concerns. Rogers pulled up the imagery in a live call, and the team made an assessment without sending anyone to the site.
"Every time I see somebody new who starts, I say, ‘You need this. Let me help you,’" Rogers said.
She extended the thinking in directions most people don't initially consider. Finance needs to depreciate equipment removed during a refresh. Rogers made sure the asset record supported that. The warehouse team needed serial numbers to process repair calls without rolling a truck. They can get that data from Phygii now.
"I want to break the silos," Rogers said. "And with this, we are definitely breaking silos."
Tia Kachman, COO of Immersion Data Solutions, has worked alongside Rogers throughout Cumberland Farms' evolution from early surveys to a fully integrated property data practice.
"What Jana describes is exactly the type of leadership it takes to bring organizations into the next level of data and property intelligence," Kachman said. "It's not just a matter of better data, it's asking how the business can work differently now that we can see and reuse this information."
That reframe captures a shift from a project-centric model to a portfolio-centric one. A project-centric approach captures information for an initiative and leaves it behind when the work closes. A portfolio-centric approach figures out how we make what we capture today useful for the next team, the next initiative, and the next capital decision.
For Rogers, that shift didn't happen all at once. It happened survey by survey, use case by use case, department by department. Eventually, the data foundation Cumberland Farms built stopped feeling like a documentation exercise and started feeling like a competitive advantage.
"Now I know I can always trust what I get from Phygii," Rogers said. "And that's everything."
At a recent Immersion Data Solutions webinar, Rogers fielded a question about what she'd say to another multi-property operator on the fence about changing the way they work with site data. She didn't hesitate.
Start with the evolution. Show people where you were, where you are, and what the gap cost you. Then let them see a real store. Let them zoom in, let them understand what they've actually been missing. Then watch what happens when the possibilities stop being abstract.
"Work smarter, not harder," Rogers said. "The data tells a story that is factual, not someone else's opinion of what's there."
A handful of peers Rogers has spoken with have since started working with Immersion Data Solutions. She has become, in her own way, an extension of the value she found, sharing it outward because she believes in it that much.