Are Fuel Costs Diminishing Your Bottom Line?

How to maintain controllable fleet operating costs—assessing the cost of preserving assets and rightsizing the fleet to ensure optimal cost-efficiency, all while improving management and efficiency—is an important conversation for construction organizations. How to reduce fuel use and costs should also come into play. The answer is simple: Excessively high fuel costs cut into profits. While fuel is a consistent overhead cost and is likely to fluctuate, construction fleets are now stabilizing fuel spending by using technology to optimize their use of it.

Organizations that believe their fuel costs are higher than they should be must work to better understand their baseline costs and potential areas for savings. Do this by focusing on a few aspects. First: dive into the fuel itself and the options available to power the fleet. Second: use fuel management technologies to track fuel spending, correct driving behaviors that increase fuel expenses and monitor fuel card transactions to identify fraud. Third: identify specific challenges that increase fuel costs for the fleet and make connections with the data to solve these issues.

What’s Powering Your Fleet?

To start the conversation about reducing fuel costs, it’s important to ensure vehicles and equipment are powered by the optimal energy source. In deciding which fuel is best for a fleet’s vehicles and equipment, construction organizations should consider their fuel efficiency and sustainability goals, operational needs, and the frequency and distance between times assets are used and in travel. The most common fuel and energy options include:

•  Gasoline—Gasoline is the most commonly used fuel for vehicles and is the least expensive. The three main grades of gasoline include regular, midgrade and premium. 
•  Diesel—According to the United States Energy Information Administration, “Diesel fuel powers most of the construction equipment in the U.S. Diesel engines can do demanding construction work, such as lifting steel beams, digging foundations and trenches, drilling wells, paving roads, and moving soil safely and efficiently.” Though it retails at a higher price point than gasoline, the higher power-to-weight ratio of diesel offers better fuel economy.
• Hybrid—Hybrid vehicles capture energy for their batteries through regenerative braking and use the energy to provide power to the wheels, reducing emissions and improving fuel economy tremendously. Hybrids still rely on either gasoline or diesel to generate power.
• Electric—Electric vehicles run 100 percent on electricity supplied from a rechargeable battery, offering a clean form of transport, completely absent of tailpipe emissions.
• Is distance taken into consideration when dispatchers select a vehicle to send to a jobsite?
• Does our organization review historical routes taken by drivers to ensure that they are the most efficient?
• What’s our policy for idling?
• How often are acceptable thresholds of idling surpassed?
• Who is our best driver?
• Who is our worst driver?
• What data are we using to coach drivers?