Opinion: Curbing Fleet Fuel Costs

By David Brown

Vice President

FleetMatics

This Opinion piece appears in the Aug. 22 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

Controlling fuel costs is one of the most important and challenging aspects of fleet management faced by companies that rely on fleet vehicles to provide products and services to their customers. Managing these ever-growing fuel costs is a daunting task, but it is absolutely essential to running a profitable business.

Fortunately, today’s technological advances provide solutions that are as simple to use as they are sophisticated in what they can provide.

For example, using GPS to track fleet vehicles is a proven tool for getting a better handle on the uses — and possible abuses — of a fleet. The system can be designed to track your fleet in live time and monitor such things as routing, scheduling, speeding, idling and overall vehicle maintenance. Many companies have experienced huge performance boosts and tremendous cost cuts simply by paying closer attention to the wealth of information the most robust GPS systems have to offer.

However, there is another not-so-obvious tool gaining popularity among field-service companies, and that is the use of fuel cards.

Fuel cards have been around for more than 25 years and initially were used to speed up and simplify the purchase of fuel for company vehicles. They provided invaluable data such as fuel grade purchased, cost per gallon, odometer reading and driver/PIN/vehicle number.

That being said, however, we must add that reports generated by many fuel-card companies were — and still can be — notoriously long and complicated.

For solving this problem, combining GPS tracking and fuel-card technologies is the perfect marriage. A GPS tracking system that allows for fuel-card integration will present information in an easy-to-read format and give you more control over your fuel usage and costs.

The best GPS tracking systems fully integrate your fuel cards with their software. With powerful reporting tools and real-time data, you can have total visibility of your fuel spending. You also can get precise fueling information for your fleet overall, as well as the individual fuel usage of a specific vehicle. This allows you to pinpoint any fuel-wasting practices easily — or even outright fuel theft.

Reliable fuel transaction information allows you to track accurate miles per gallon, pinpoint the direct causes of high fuel consumption, eliminate fuel leakage, enforce fuel-saving driving habits, ensure that your vehicles run efficiently, and ultimately reduce your overall fuel costs.

Much of the new fuel-card technology is integrated with mobile communications systems. For example, GPS programs providing real-time vehicle location also are able to locate the nearest low-cost fuel station.

As technology advances, so do the ways in which fuel cards and GPS tracking can work together to provide very real and very measurable ways to cut back on your fleet’s fuel expenses.

The following are a variety of ways available today in which fuel cards integrated with robust GPS fleet tracking can help your company to save money and run more efficiently:

• Lost-fuel reporting helps you detect fuel-card abuse by highlighting incidents in which a vehicle was not at the gas pump at the time its assigned card was used. This feature also shows incidents where the gallons pumped for a transaction exceeded the fuel-tank size of the assigned vehicle.

• Fuel-purchase reporting gives you detailed transaction activity for each vehicle on demand, without having to dig through your monthly fuel-card bill. You can use this reporting to identify vehicles that operate inefficiently and see where every fuel dollar was spent.

• Fuel-purchase summary reporting provides you with a complete picture of fuel transaction activity for your entire fleet.  You can use this data to serve as a baseline for fuel-usage improvements and to monitor your fuel budget, comparing fuel usage between vehicles.

• Fuel-efficiency reporting allows you to see which vehicles are running efficiently and which do not meet their target MPG based on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates. It also shows how speeding and time spent idling affects fuel costs. Use these reports to pinpoint fuel-wasting driving behaviors and inefficient vehicles.

• Carbon-footprint reporting allows you to calculate the carbon footprint of each vehicle by summarizing your fleet’s total carbon footprint. Use this information to decrease your environmental effects, secure “green” contracts and prove your environmental concerns to customers.

As you can see, fuel cards provide more than what meets the eye in terms of running your business more cost effectively and efficiently. If you haven’t already made use of these new technologies, it’s not too late, and you’ll find that the costs of doing so are surprisingly inexpensive compared with the potential — and very real — savings they will help your company to realize.

FleetMatics, Dublin, Ireland, is a global provider of software-as-a-service fleet management solutions for small- and medium-size businesses. Its U.S. headquarters are in Boston.