Your fuel data has much to tell you and can help you drive down costs significantly. It comes down to knowing how to read your fuel data intelligently.
Your Biggest Fuel Costs Aren’t from The Pumps
Fuel is generally your fleet’s highest variable cost, always rising faster than revenue and margins allow. And this will continue as forecasts indicate that Brent Crude Oil prices will average below $100/bbl in 2023 (Reuters). To add proverbial fuel to the fire, this is mainly due to mismanagement.
You’d be amazed at the drastic cost savings from thoroughly investigating fuel exceptions. They can highlight instances of poor driving, load management, and routing. Just as important, they can identify possible fuel theft and fraud.
There are many fuel management strategies, and FleetIT advocates using them all. In fact, FleetIT helps streamline your fleet management efforts. So, you can benefit from several globally recognised solutions without adding more to your workload.
Let’s show you how to guarantee fuel savings.
Recommended Fuel Management Methods
We recommend implementing as many of these methodologies as possible.
- Top-quality fuel probes to manage sudden spikes and dips as they happen
- Secure anti-siphoning devices (that prevent and stop fuel extraction from the tank)
- Measuring fuel usage as an engine measurement, and
- Using a telematics solution to read and report on this data (if your vehicle offers this).
- Use route optimisation software to generate the most revenue with the lowest possible mileage.
- Installing Onboard Digital Scales to ensure assets are efficiently loaded at all times.
It gets better!
The final most effective—and arguably cheapest—method of fuel management is through transactional fuel data management.
Better Fleet Management via Your Fuel Data
With the correct reporting and exception alerts, you can easily detect theft or fraud. You can improve route management and even transform poor driving behaviour!
You have to admit; those last two have you thinking. Driving behaviour and route management from fuel data? Yes! Here is how.
Driving behaviour requires coaching. The magic is that your fuel data can pinpoint when coaching is needed. It saves time and other resources by providing analytics and evidence for performance improvement programmes.
Comparing fuel cost and mileage driven vs sales in real-time helps with route management decisions.
Real Examples of Fuel Data Analytics Saving Money in Fleet Management
Here is real-world insight from our fuel analysis team. They use FleetIT’s exception alerts and action boards to read customers’ fuel consumption data intelligently. FleetIT monitors vehicles’ fuel consumption and raises discrepancy alerts as soon as new fuel data enters the system. That way, you can respond immediately, mitigating any losses.
1. Fuel Consumption Below 75% of the Average
Very low fuel consumption tells fleet managers that there may be errors with their fuel data. The main culprits are often missing records, swapped fuel cards, or simple errors during capturing odometer readings.
It is vital to correct these exceptions to mitigate loss. Any calculations of trends and averages for planning and issue detection will be wrong if your input data is inaccurate.
Pro tip: Low consumption often indicates missing data, a tell-tale sign of fuel card fraud!
Fuel Consumption 20– 40% Above the Average
Fuel consumption that is marginally above the average often gets dismissed as an operational issue. Not so fast. You should monitor these instances because they could highlight:
- Tank skimming,
- Poor routing,
- Excessive loading, or
- Card fraud attempts.
Fleet managers should investigate when consumption is between 10%-40% above the target. We recommend reviewing your fleet’s history of excessive fuel consumption compared to trip sheets, telematics data and camera footage (if available).
Here is why. Suppose a vehicle ran 10 l/100 km and had a 40% increase in consumption. It would have travelled around 150 km less than usual. It would then need to use an additional 20 litres to achieve the same mileage. Assuming a price of ZAR 25.00 per litre of diesel, that is a loss of ZAR 500.00!
Imagine that on 1 tank a week across a fleet of 50 vehicles.
Fuel Consumption 50% Above the Average or Higher
Raise red flags if fuel consumption is more than 50% above the average and data issues have been eliminated, as this can only indicate theft or fraud on the asset. These instances should be raised to operations immediately. Review telematics data and camera footage urgently and question the driver without delay. Such incidents are rarely not theft.
Pro tip: review transaction exceptions daily to eliminate data discrepancies. That way, you can avoid draining resources because you are only investigating only true anomalies.
Fuel management is a key part of fleet management. The wrong decisions lead to unnecessarily high fuel costs. Fortunately, FleetIT turns your fuel data insight into actionable steps to manage your fleet.
BOOK A DEMO