Make use of data to control fuel costs, says Mycompanyfleet
Rising fuel costs remain high on the list of fleet concerns. But fleet managers could control fuel costs more tightly by making better use of all available data from sources such as fuel and maintenance cards and reacting accordingly.
Mycompanyfleet says that with the increasing taxes across Europe due to the Government-imposed austerity measures in many countries, plus high demand for oil in the BRIC countries (Brazil, China, India and Russia), high fuel prices are here to stay.
Finance directors and fleet managers cannot afford to ignore this fact because it will continue to eat into business profit margins and, in an economy struggling to recover from recession, there is only so much room for passing cost increases onto corporate customers.
Instead, fleet managers need to analyse all available data captured through mediums such as fuel and maintenance cards, to identify areas where they need to take immediate management action. To help them, Mycompanyfleet software can display the data graphically through exception reporting and highly visual graphs to highlight any areas in need of attention.
Mycompanyfleet Product Development Manager, Paul Jackson, said “Over the last two years, we have spent considerable time addressing the concerns of fleet managers over rising fuel costs. One area we have tackled in depth is capturing, analysing and then displaying data from fleet suppliers in the form of exception reporting to allow fleet managers to make sense of it.
“The key players in the fuel and maintenance card industry have made huge improvements on the amount of data they gather when drivers fill up or have their vehicle serviced or repaired. Remember the data they collect is yours, so make good use of it.
“At Mycompanyfleet, we leverage this rich data to build sophisticated yet simple to understand exception reports and graphs. By using these, the fleet manager can quickly spot if one of his drivers is abusing a company asset, or when it’s time to dispose of one of his vans because it is costing 10% more to run per year than a younger vehicle.
“It is very rewarding as software supplier to have a customer thank you for you giving them the transparency they never had before, plus the ability to save on fuel and maintenance costs, through being able have to make more informed decisions because all the key costs are collated and displayed in one database,” he added
The Mycompanyfleet software solutions have a number of configurable options which flag up when exceptions occur, such as the purchase of fuel over a certain limit. These also include alerts to show when business mileages have been exceeded, or when fuel is being purchased without suitable authority levels.
“Our systems have great reporting capabilities and are highly configurable. Fleet managers can select from a number of alerts that they can enable within the system to tell them when exceptions have occurred,” added Paul Jackson.
Paul Jackson, Mycompanyfleet