It would be hard to conduct your business without fuel. Especially if your business is fuel. Something like fleet management or a fueling operation. A fuel management system has become a vital necessity for every company that operates vehicles.
No realistic person expects to see fuel costs go down – soon, or ever. We might catch a temporary break sometimes with fluctuating prices, but overall we’re resigned to high prices. So it’s essential to find savings elsewhere. And that’s where a fuel management system comes into play.
Not surprisingly, the cost of fuel represents the highest operations expense for the vast majority of fuel-centric businesses. Other than your people, that is. Anything that takes that big a bite out of your budget needs serious consideration – the kind you can get with a fuel management system.
There’s far more to controlling fuel costs than simply the price of gas or diesel. Tracking how you handle and use your fuel has become a business survival tool.
Knowledge is power.
The widespread availability of technology now enables any type of business to take advantage of specialized software to greatly improve asset management – both human and fleet assets. You can gather far more data, in real time.
That helps you gain greater understanding and insight into your entire operation. You can make better daily management decisions. You can forecast more accurately, making better-targeted long-term plans. It’s easy to meet government compliance and reporting requirements. You’re in control with a fuel management system.
Increased automation makes you more efficient.
Bypass the wasted time and mistakes inherent with manual procedures, and go straight to complete – and completely accurate – record keeping. The right fuel management system (like a FuelMaster AIM2) gives you so much control, you can virtually eliminate theft or other of “unexplained” losses.
Drivers don’t have to remember to capture all the needed information, because the system handles everything for them. They literally cannot dispense the wrong fuel into a vehicle. Your back-office staff can’t misread handwriting or have to work around missing data.
Increased efficiency begets more of the same.
Real time intelligence gives you greater awareness, so you can uncover more ways to increase productivity and reduce fuel consumption. You have a vast array of useful details, right at the fingertips of anyone who needs it. They have access 24/7, because your fuel management system stores data on a central database. And it’s retrievable in a variety of commonly-used formats.
A fuel management system with GPS helps you reduce miles driven.
Knowing where vehicles and drivers are, and when, lets you evaluate and streamline your routing and scheduling. And because your system captures data about vehicle performance, you can detect wasteful practices. Over-idling, PTO, unauthorized side trips, etc. all waste gas and increase wear and tear, decreasing performance as well as vehicle lifespan. That carves dangerously into your ROI.
It also means you have to replace parts more frequently, blowing your budget for that, too.
Vehicle status alerts enable you to preserve regular service intervals and know right away if problems are developing – just the information you need to hold down maintenance costs and head off costly repairs.
Armed with real, accurate data, you might even be able to negotiate a better price for the fuel you purchase.
You need every edge you can get to keep your business running profitably. A fuel management system puts you in the driver’s seat – to gain control of your fuel assets and guarantee every drop is used wisely. Even small savings can add up handsomely, depending on the number of vehicles in your fleet and how you use them.
It takes only a few quick calculations to demonstrate to yourself the tremendous savings you could realize by the end of the year. What could you do with that money? It’s time to make tracking fuel costs a priority. Now you need to know what questions to ask when purchasing a fleet fuel management system.