Supermarket fuel can help cut fleet costs, says Mycompanyfleet
Directing drivers to use on supermarket fuel rather than from branded forecourts can make a huge difference to annual fleet fuel bills, says software solutions provider Mycompanyfleet.
According to the latest figures from the AA, fuel prices continue to rise at the nation’s fuel pumps, but the cheapest fuel continues to be found at supermarket forecourts.
AA figures shows that diesel now costs on average 137.5p a litre or £6.25 per gallon from a supermarket compared to a national average of 139.9p per litre or £6.36 per gallon, a saving of 2.4p per litre or 11p per gallon.
That means that a company car driver travelling 30,000 miles a year in a Ford Mondeo 2.0 Duratorq TDCi, with an average fuel consumption of 53.3mpg, would see a fuel cost saving of £185.74 over three years by filling up at supermarkets rather than branded outlets.
On a fleet of 200 similar cars over a typical three year replacement cycle that adds up to an impressive fuel cost saving of £37,508, simply by steering clear of garage forecourts in favour of supermarkets, says Mycompanyfleet’s Jon Tandy.
And says Tandy, recently appointed business development manager at Mycompanyfleet, the automotive division of HR software giant NorthgateArinso, there are plenty of other low-cost actions that fleets can take that can help cut fuel bills by between 5 and 10%.
“At Mycompanyfleet, we firmly believe that a powerful yet easy to use dashboard tool is key in helping our customers control fuel and other fleet operating costs,” he said.
The dashboard offering within Mycompanyfleet’s FleetAcumen fleet management system allows users to set KPIs (key performance indicators) to measure important parameters for fuel costs, such as pence per mile cost, miles per gallon, carbon emissions and league tables of worst and best performing drivers .
These provide all the business intelligence measurements a fleet manager would need to make informed decisions on managing fuel costs more effectively.
At the same time, key fuel data can be downloaded from fuel cards of virtually any description directly into the fleet management system, allowing information to be fed back to the fleet manager via management reports, including location of cheapest fuel such as supermarkets, and exceptions by cost centre and against budget.
“FleetAcumen allows the fleet manager to configure the look and feel of the dashboard to suit his or her own business requirements, and it’s all encapsulated into our fleet software bundle so there’s no shock having to purchase an additional business intelligence tool to analyse it as there is with other systems,” said Jon Tandy.
“A powerful dashboard offering like ours will allow the user to make more informed decisions using benchmarking techniques, and real life fleet experience shows that this can easily return savings fuel cost savings of 5% or more,” he said.
“ Fleet Acumen also operates on an enterprise-wide basis so that, rather than having separate systems for logistics , fleet management and fuel management, you get the complete fleet management toolset, including an an advanced dashboard offering, to manage everyday back office tasks, like fines, maintenance, duty of care, grey fleet and all vehicle details,” he added.