Commercial vehicles are vital for a smooth and efficient operation, particularly in delivery and distribution channels. Managing this fleet is necessary to meet customer demands, improve customer satisfaction, boost productivity, and reduce operational costs. Besides tracking vehicles and performing vehicle maintenance, part of your responsibility involves fuel management.
How Do Commercial Vehicles Waste Fuel
Driving habits like speeding, harsh braking, and idling contribute to poor fuel usage. In fact, idling can potentially waste up to a gallon of fuel per hour. This behaviour is similar to pouring money down the drain.
Fortunately, these fuel wasters can be prevented with fuel data. By providing feedback to your drivers with this information, long-term good driving habits can be encouraged and practised. This leads to less fuel consumption across all fleet vehicles over time.
Why Is Fuel Data Important?
Fuel is one of the most costly expenses associated with fleet vehicles. Although its fluctuating cost is not in your control, tracking fuel usage can help manage costs. This process of monitoring fuel consumption is called fuel management.
Fuel data is usually collected manually by monitoring miles travelled and matching these figures to fuel receipts. However, this process is prone to inconsistencies. Some fleet managers make mistakes when crunching the numbers, and drivers lose their receipts or write numbers down incorrectly. This is why it’s necessary to look for an automated solution to evade human error.
Inaccurate fuel usage can result in problems in budgeting and resource management. For instance, underestimating fuel expenditure can force you to allocate more budget to fuel than necessary. On the other hand, overestimating it can cause you to miss out on other worthwhile financial investments. Thankfully, these challenges of collecting fuel data manually can be addressed with fleet management software.
Why Should I Invest in Fleet Management Software?
Investing in fleet fuel management software can help with improving your fuel monitoring efficiency. For example, it allows the fuel purchase process to become automated by integrating with mobile communications and dispatch systems. Through fuel optimisation, driver compliance is enhanced and fuel wasted is mitigated.
Fleet management software also provides information about driving habits, run time, and miles-per-gallon figures. This can help you understand how much fuel is used.
Additionally, it has a telematics feature that tracks vehicle performance, vehicle idling, and harsh driving. The collection of this data gives you an overview of your fleet drivers’ impact on fuel consumption. As a result, fleet managers can make more informed and profitable decisions on running their fleet.
Furthermore, since you will have a constant source of crucial data, you can use it not only to cut down fuel costs but also to plan better routes, save time, comply with schedules, and keep the vehicles running longer. In other words, you can work towards improving your overall fleet operation.
Conclusion
Fuel usage data is essential for savings. Making your fleet as fuel-efficient as possible and streamlining the process can be done using the right fleet management software. By analysing detailed and accurate information, you can see where overconsumption occurs and gain insights into making the necessary changes to eliminate unnecessary fuel usage.
Keep fuel costs under control by equipping your vehicles with fuel management software. At Manage Vehicle, we provide a business vehicle management system that cuts down on fuel costs and eliminates extra miles and delays in delivery. Contact us to run your fleet more smoothly!
