Essential Things To Know About Fuel Management

1. Know your fleet

It’s important to have a full all-round working knowledge of your entire fleet including vehicles, drivers, customers, processes, systems, spend, and regulations. Having this ‘bigger picture’ approach is ideal when understanding the reasons for the current fuel spend. As the demands on a fleet are unique to your business, the opportunity to save fuel costs is knowing what you do now, and how these practices and procedures can be made even better.

2. Monitor fleet driver behavior

Driver behaviors such as speeding, irregular gear changes, and hard braking can have a negative impact on vehicle fuel consumption. Reducing speed is an easy way to cut fuel costs. It’s safe to say, many drivers simply don’t realize how much fuel costs a fleet and the impact that their driving can have on this. Without good driver buy-in, you’ll be hard pushed to achieve any real changes. And getting them fully on-board is critical in creating better drivers and reducing costs.

3. Plan routes ahead

Ever heard the saying, proper planning prevents poor performance? From assessing, driver routes to analyzing the best places to refuel your vehicles – planning ahead can potentially lead to big savings. The ability to track and monitor vehicles helps avoid congestion where possible or prevent unnecessary journey overlap.

4. The importance of maintenance management

Having a good fleet maintenance program and ensuring that drivers carry out daily walk round checks is an essential part of fleet vehicle maintenance management. Making sure that vehicles are fully serviced and maintained is a big help in controlling fuel spend.

5. Consider how you purchase your fuel

It is worthwhile reviewing how you currently purchase your fuel to determine the best, cost-saving options. This could be buying in bulk at wholesale prices or through the use of fuel cards (if the latter then make sure you choose the best fuel card for the needs of your fleet). Whichever option you choose, it is always worthwhile regularly reviewing your fuel purchase options to make sure that you continue to receive the best deal.

It goes without saying, keeping track of fuel spending is essential. Fuel fraud is not as uncommon as you may think – discrepancies in mileage for vehicles or a sudden increase in fuel spend need investigating. Fleet fuel management systems can play an important part in alerting to any irregularities in fuel costs, supporting a prompt and efficient investigation to quickly determine the cause.