During the fourth installment of our Connected Customer webinar series, Integrated Solutions Architect Patrick Quiery demonstrated how proactively monitoring and comparing key metrics will help you manage fleet fuel spend and increase savings and accountability.   

Utilizing your fuel data and executing on best practices for monitoring fuel usage can help drive operational efficiency beyond just the cost of fuel.  

Fuel is One of the Most Expensive Recurring Costs for a Fleet

Fuel represents approximately 60% of a fleet’s total operating costs, and it’s important to have insights and visibility on how to manage it (Automated Fleet: Operating Costs Remain Flat for Fifth Straight Year).  Monitoring fleet fuel spend patterns, discrepancies, maintenance and driver safety can all help you better manage fuel costs for your organization.

Personal use of fuel cards, delaying routine or necessary maintenance, unsafe driving and even poorly optimized routing can all lead to increased fuel spend and waste. Being able to know when drivers are using their fuel card to make personal purchases or sharing the card’s personal identification numbers between drivers will help you prevent it and increase accountability. 

In order to manage every aspect of fuel usage, organizations need to have fuel cards integrated with their telematics and fuel management solution. With the right fuel management system, managers can ensure that alerts are triggered when a discrepancy happens as well as be able to monitor fuel spend trends over time.  

If you integrate your fleet fuel cards with your fuel management system, you’ll be able to set up alerts on any fuel spend discrepancies to uncover fuel waste and abuse. Fuel spend anomalies can include a vehicle not being at the pump at time of purchase or fuel that was just purchased for a short-range-use vehicle yesterday. Just having access to these insights will help keep drivers accountable and could eliminate any unauthorized fuel spend.  

Smarter Fuel Management Goes Beyond Individual Purchases 

To help your organization further reduce costs and increase fuel economy, it’s imperative to have cross-functional visibility beyond what fuel has been purchased for which vehicle and when. Being able to increase a vehicle’s fuel economy by even one MPG can save a 300-vehicle fleet as much as $54,000 per year. 

Running a comprehensive safety program (which can also include daily vehicle inspections) not only allows you to – most importantly – ensure the safest environment for your drivers but it also positively affects fuel efficiency, maintenance spend and much more. Excessive idling, speeding and more all have an impact on fuel and wear and tear on the vehicle.  

Companies often rely on manually entered odometer readings, which causes issues in data accuracy and consistency of providing this information to maintenance. If maintenance doesn’t have the mileage (and other) data they need to keep the vehicles and assets on a proactive maintenance schedule, there will be increased wear and tear on a vehicle which, in turn, decreases fuel efficiency (and can then lead to a vehicle being taken out of service unexpectedly, which will then cause bigger problems for your operations).  

Tying it all together and improving on even one individual data point – let alone all of them together – can have a meaningful impact on your organization’s bottom line. 

Looking to gain insights and visibility into your fuel costs? Let’s chat. 

How IntelliShift’s Solution Helps Reduce Your 2nd Biggest Operating Cost 

IntelliShift’s configurable platform provides end-to-end visibility through its suite of solutions for fuel management, driver behavior, safety, compliance, predictive analytics and more. 

Digging into our fuel management solution specifically, we offer: 

• Fuel consumption–based score cards 
• Vehicle MPG 
• Vehicle gallons per hour 
• Excessive fuel purchases 
• Vehicle not at fueling location alerts 
• Weekly fuel consumption 
• Month-to-date total fuel consumption report 
• And more 

IntelliShift is the leader in connected vehicle and asset operations, delivering unified data and actionable insights to predict and optimize business performance. IntelliShift’s comprehensive solution empowers you to be proactive with not only fuel management but also driver accountability, driver safety, preventative maintenance and much more.   

Looking to gain visibility into and control over your fuel costs? Let’s chat.