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Starting the year with the goal of reducing your business expenses is a popular trend, especially in sectors where those costs are difficult to change, such as commercial fleets. Fuel management is the most time-consuming area of a fleet’s expenses, and it must be maintained with attention to avoid unnecessary loss of profits. Are you aware that effective fleet management will also have the additional benefit of improving your company’s fuel management? Read on to learn more about the advantages of this partnership.
How Does Effective Fleet Management Affect Fuel Management?
Managing a fleet has a lot of similarities with managing other businesses, such as employee satisfaction, productivity, and safety, but because of the assets required, fleets have additional factors to consider. These are those extra considerations:
- Asset maintenance
- Fuel procurement
- Route efficiency
These additional areas are the connection points between fuel and fleet management; by optimising them to their fullest potential, you’ll find your fuel costs decreasing as a byproduct of effective fleet management. Here are some more details.
Asset Maintenance
This covers all areas of the business’s equipment and tools, with the most important assets being the vehicles comprising the fleet itself. Each vehicle is a vital element of any fleet’s daily operations and must have its mechanical health monitored regularly to ensure the reliability of the asset. A common tool for asset maintenance within fleet management is planned preventative maintenance with extra events scheduled for seasonal changes.
Assets that are poorly maintained will develop slow faults and potential engine issues. These growing problems will tax the vehicle’s operation and force it to use more fuel to operate. These faults can be from damage, poor driving, or simply wear over time.
One tool that is highly effective at resolving this problem is the implementation of a DVIR (daily vehicle inspection report) conducted by your team. With this and other initiatives in place, you are not only securing the future of your vehicle assets but also supporting your fuel management strategy to create a concurrently beneficial result.
Fuel Procurement
This involves making sure that your vehicles have enough fuel to complete their tasks. Whilst fuel can be purchased in many ways, such as fuel cards, most companies will choose the convenience of onsite fuel tanks for the needs of their fleet and the reduced fuel costs they provide. Lack of access to sufficient fuel will have a significant impact on the productivity of any vehicle-based operation, making appropriate procurement an essential element of fleet management.
Several elements are needed to benefit from having fuel on site, for example:
Once installed, your business will have personal access to a sufficient fuel source 24/7 to suit your fleet needs, but you also will have the opportunity to explore cost reductions impossible at forecourts, such as wholesale prices.
Wholesale Fuel Purchases
There are many benefits to wholesale fuel purchases over forecourt prices. With bulk purchases, operators can often negotiate more favourable pricing structures with suppliers, resulting in substantial cost savings. Wholesale purchases stored in onsite tanks allow for reductions related to scale, as larger quantities of fuel are acquired at lower unit costs, thereby directly impacting the overall operational expenses of the fleet.
The stability of wholesale prices internationally provides commercial fleet operators with a degree of predictability in budgeting and financial planning. Unlike the erratic nature of forecourt prices, which are influenced by various external factors, wholesale agreements often involve fixed or more predictable pricing models. This stability allows operators to formulate more accurate budget projections and mitigate the impact of unexpected fuel price spikes on your expenses.
Route Efficiency and Eco-Driving
Planning efficient travel routes for your drivers has a noticeable effect on your fuel usage. It is common practice to develop fuel-efficient routes that will accomplish the work without wasting fuel in the process. If you’re looking to maximise the potential time and cost savings for your fleet from route planning and tracking, pairing up these techniques with your existing fuel management system will save your fleet a sizeable amount of time and money over time.
However, you should keep track of exactly how much fuel has been consumed for any given trip, which you can compare to your route tracking system. If you’re finding that a particular route is viewed as the shortest and, therefore, most efficient, but your fleet appears to be consuming a large amount of fuel, it may be worth looking into taking a different one. You could also ask your driver if the original route is prone to traffic congestion or involves a lot of stopping and starting. Additionally, using route tracking in tandem with eco-driving techniques, such as no idling, is another highly effective combination to reduce fuel usage, similar to combining fleet and fuel management.
Effective Fuel Management with Fueltek’s Solutions
At Fueltek, we pride ourselves on providing the most effective fleet and fuel management systems for commercial fleets, such as a wireless fuel monitoring system or our onsite fuel storage and dispensing hardware. Contact us to explore how our options will benefit your business’s fuel expenses this year.
For more information on How Great Fleet Management Leads to Improved Fuel Management talk to Fueltek Ltd