Fuel-card provider Wex Inc. announced that it plans to help fleets better manage purchases by combining its fuel data with telematics data from electronic logging devices.
That integration will enable dynamic routing to guide drivers toward the lowest-cost fueling sites, said Bernie Kavanagh, vice president of the company’s North American fleet business.
Rather than developing its own ELD, Wex resells telematics devices to its customer base through partnerships with four technology suppliers — GPS Insight, GeoTab, Verizon Networkfleet and BSM Wireless.
Wex is testing integrations of those providers’ telematics systems with its ClearView fleet analytics platform. The company aims to offer the added functionality by the end of this year or in early 2017, Kavanagh told Transport Topics.
“While the [ELD] itself is somebody else’s product, there’s a lot of integration that goes on behind the scenes,” he said. “A lot of what’s happening now is about the data. It’s about the aggregation of that data and the controls that can be put in place.”
Wex already can track customers’ fuel transactions and immediately send messages to the driver, fleet manager or both when a fuel purchase is not within the parameters the fleet has set.
With the addition of telematics, the technology also can provide drivers with directions to the best places to fuel up and potentially catch misuse of fuel cards by detecting when a fuel purchase wasn’t in the same location as the truck, for example, Kavanagh said.
He said Wex is seeking to help its customers not only comply with the upcoming ELD mandate, but also use the data generated by the devices to improve their operations.
The federal ELD rule, which is set to go into effect Dec. 18, 2017, will require most truckers who currently keep paper logbooks to switch to ELDs to record their hours of service.
