Think of fleet fuel management systems and pictures of fancy (and very smart) electronics probably come to your mind. Hardware like tank gauges, probes, and meter registers play an important role in optimizing fuel management.
However, hardware is just one part of the fuel management picture. A robust fleet fuel management system does more than track fuel—it also prevents undesirable outcomes like gas theft and inefficient driver behavior that burns money.
A fleet fuel management system helps you increase fuel mileage with hardware (telematics), software (fleet management systems), and smart fuel cards. In this article, we dive into these three fuel management system pillars and explore how they work together.
How Does A Fuel Management System Work?
Fuel management systems monitor, control, and increase fuel efficiency through hardware and software. While some might think of a fuel management system as a collection of probes, modern fuel management systems do much more than track fuel consumption.
They automate fuel management tasks, save you money, and centralize vehicle performance data in a single dashboard, offering you full control over your fleet’s performance.
The 3 Elements Of A Fleet Fuel Management System
Modern fuel management systems use three elements that gather, automate, and centralize fleet vehicle data:
- Telematics – This refers to the hardware that collects vehicle data.
- Smart fuel cards – These payment systems automate spend management and ensure security.
- Fleet management systems – These software platforms bring telematics and spend data together, giving you granular views of fleet performance.
While these elements are powerful by themselves, integrating them helps you automate fuel management workflows, giving you more time to monitor fleet performance and increase overall efficiency.
We explore these elements one by one in later sections.
The Benefits Of Fuel Management Systems
Integrated fleet fuel management systems incorporating the three elements above offer the following benefits:
- They save time – Instead of collecting paper receipts and tracking data on spreadsheets, these systems create unalterable fuel usage records. Access data quickly and make decisions instantly.
- They offer data-backed ways of improving fuel efficiency – The volume of data these systems gather helps you identify performance per driver and vehicle. Conduct preventative maintenance or proactively inform drivers of inefficient behaviors that increase fuel expenses.
- They integrate security automatically – Automated controls prevent unauthorized gas card use, card skimming, filling personal vehicles with company fuel, and other forms of gas theft. Prevent collusion through features like geofencing and smart routing automatically.
Let’s dive deeper into these three elements to see how they work and their roles in a top-notch fleet fuel management system.
Key Element #1 Of Fleet Fuel Management Systems: Telematics
Telematics refers to hardware devices that offer real-time data about vehicle activity—from location to vehicle condition. Telematics devices are an integral part of a modern fleet operation and usually consist of the following:
- Onboard diagnostic equipment
- Global positioning systems (GPS)
- Communication systems
While telematics systems give you plenty of data to monitor vehicle performance, they don’t ensure optimal fuel efficiency by themselves. They’re reporting devices and you must spend time sifting the data to ensure your fleet’s performance is up to standard.
For instance, telematics systems can inform you of idling times and engine performance. But you must examine the data to figure out whether your drivers are idling for longer than usual or if your vehicles’ engines are performing optimally.
In short, telematics needs analytics and automation to make a difference to your fleet’s fuel efficiency. Analytics helps you connect the dots in your data and automation helps you enforce fleet fuel policies without creating additional clerical work that takes you away from more critical tasks (like identifying fuel efficiency gaps).
Key Element #2 Of Fleet Fuel Management Systems: Smart Fuel Cards
Smart fuel cards remove the shortcomings that older-generation fleet gas cards impose. If you’re using an older card, you may have noticed any number of these issues:
- Older-generation gas cards only enable payment and rarely ensure security.
- Older-generation gas cards do not integrate easily with telematics—you must manually review data and compare it to driver reports.
- Older cards do not eliminate paper receipts—perhaps the biggest weakness in a fleet fuel expense tracking process.
- Older-generation fuel cards do not prevent gas slippage from drivers filling up personal vehicles and colluding with station owners or other drivers.
- Older fuel cards restrict drivers to approved fuel stations without wiggle room for emergencies. They also rarely allow purchases other than fuel, creating an expense reporting headache.
These weaknesses mean fleets using older-generation gas cards are out of sync with modern trends. And these problems get worse with scale.
A fleet manager tracking fuel expense reports of a 30-vehicle fleet will spend more time filing and tracking paper receipts instead of monitoring fleet efficiency and prescribing proactive maintenance.
Open loop smart fuel cards automate several fuel management tasks, giving fleet managers more of their time back. For starters, smart fuel cards do not restrict purchases to pre-approved gas stations—hence the “open loop” label.
They help you define pre-approved routes and gas stations based on data while offering ways to handle exceptional cases. For example, a smart fuel card like Coast works at any location accepting Visa. But you can restrict its use from locations not on a pre-approved list.
Drivers can request an exemption from their managers in exceptional circumstances—ensuring you monitor only these requests and not every single purchase. The automation doesn’t stop there.
Features like driver check-in by SMS, automated spend categorization, and preset category spending limits help you automate fuel spending policies. Integration with telematics helps you monitor fuel fill-ups that exceed vehicle tank capacity, indicating possible theft.
Smart fuel cards like Coast also offer granular data (called Level 3 data) that gives you more context around a purchase, aiding audits. For example, here’s the data Coast’s smart fuel card gives you:
- Oil company name
- Purchase time
- Motor fuel service type
- Product code
- Item description
- Item quantity
- Item unit of measure
- Extended item amount
- Debit or credit indicator
- Motor fuel information
- Odometer reading
- Vehicle number
- Driver ID
- Product type code
- Card acceptor type
In short, linking telematics to smart fuel cards eliminates manual fuel management processes and gives you more time to focus on efficiency bottlenecks.
But smart fuel cards do more than this. They also plug into the third element of a fuel management program and help you quantify your fleet’s efficiencies.
Key Element #3 Of Fleet Fuel Management Systems: Fleet Management Platforms
Fleet management platforms are the last element ensuring top-notch fuel management. These platforms gather and centralize your fleet’s data, giving you granular performance views and offering analytics that help you craft policies.
But fleet management platforms need data to deliver these benefits—data that telematics and smart fuel cards possess in abundance. Integrations with telematics and smart fuel cards help you tie vehicle performance data with spending trends easily.
You receive a digital audit trail of each asset in your fleet, whether a vehicle or a driver. This link helps you spot issues proactively, increasing fleet efficiency.
For example, telematics might indicate increased idling times for a vehicle in your fleet. Fuel spending data from your smart gas card will help you correlate this increase to gas expenses.
You can dig deeper into your fleet management platform to dissect trends.
You can answer questions like:
- Has this vehicle always experienced longer idling times? Or is this a driver issue?
- Has this driver routinely spent more on fuel than the average? Or is this a recent development?
- Have route changes contributed to longer idling times? Is there a more efficient route your driver could take?
- Does the time of the day create more fuel expenses? Can you save money by switching route timing?
Fleet management platforms also help you spot maintenance issues quickly. A vehicle’s engine might need maintenance ahead of schedule and a nosedive in MPG data will alert you.
By bringing telematics and smart fuel card data onto a single platform, you can quantify fleet performance and offer data-backed ways for your drivers to improve their driving efficiency. Without this link, you’ll have to resort to guesswork—hardly ideal for a modern fleet operation.
The Three-Pronged Approach To Fleet Fuel Management
Fleet fuel management has long boiled down to installing machines and reviewing their data manually. Modern fleets need more technological firepower to guarantee safety and efficiency—firepower that telematics, smart fuel cards, and fleet management systems bring.
Curious about the impact smart fuel cards can have on your fleet? Learn how Coast’s smart fuel cards can help you save $25,000 annually from fuel theft.
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