Many people believe that environmentally-friendly fleet upgrades are cost prohibitive. In fact, the opposite is true: proper mobile fleet management technology not only lessens a fleet’s impact on the environment, its improvements to an operation’s overall efficiency saves money in the long run. This white paper outlines several historical approaches to a greener fleet and why they fail. It discusses how new fleet management technologies can improve a company’s bottom line, and lists several policies that managers can implement immediately to save money and the environment, all at no cost.
If you manage a fleet of vehicles, you’re going to spend a significant amount of money on gasoline. In fact, it might be one of your highest [figures]. When your vehicles pull up to the pump, chances are good your drivers will see something like this:
But what do the numbers mean? They’re what’s called the Research Octane Number (RON) or the Anti-Knock Index (AKI). They refer to the ratio of iso-octane versus heptane in the gasoline. For example, gasoline with an octane rating of 90 means the gas is 90% iso-octane and 10% heptane. That’s all well and good, but how does it affect your fleet?
There are two ways for gasoline to ignite. The first is with a flame or spark, which is what a spark plug does. But if you compress gasoline enough it will ignite spontaneously, without the need for a spark or flame. When you compress gasoline along with air, you get a much larger ignition than if you just compressed gasoline by itself. Adding air to your gasoline is the job of a vehicle’s carburetor or fuel injectors. Compressing the gasoline along with air is the job of a vehicle’s pistons.
When the piston in an engine compresses gasoline before a spark plug fires, there’s always the possibility that the gasoline will ignite prematurely. If this happens before an engine is ready, the exploding gasoline will drive the pistons backwards. It’s like trying to walk through a revolving door while every few seconds some jerk pushes the glass in the wrong direction. When this happens in an engine, you get a knocking sound as the engine fights against itself. Not only is this bad for fuel efficiency, this can cause serious damage.
Gasoline with a higher octane number require more compression before it explodes, meaning that it’s less likely to explode in a piston before the spark plug sets it off. Because the gasoline has a high octane rating, gas companies charge more money for it.
What most people don’t know is that modern vehicle engines include a knock sensor which detects knocking and compensates by adjusting the amount of air included with the gasoline to prevent it from igniting prematurely.
There are two types of vehicles which can benefit from high octane gasoline. The first is the forty year old clunker, which has no knock sensor. The second is the ultra high-end fantasy car – we’re talking Lamborghini here – which has an engine designed to withstand gasoline compressed to extremes and convert the larger ignition into faster speeds.
So what’s the point of spending more money on premium gasoline for your fleet?
There isn’t any. Unless your fleet has record players for stereos or can hit 250 miles per hour on the highway, there’s no reason to buy premium gas.
When temperatures start to rise, fleet drivers have one of two options: they can crank the air conditioning or open windows. We’ve all heard that opening windows is more environmentally-friendly solution because air conditioning requires a running engine, and a running engine takes fuel.
The answer isn’t as cut and dry as you might expect, but it’s very simple.
“When you’re driving across town in stop-and-go traffic,” says Frank Hampshire, Director of Market Research with the Automotive Aftermarket Suppliers Association (AASA), “it’s more fuel efficient to drive with the air conditioning off, windows down.” More specifically, when your vehicle is travelling at 40 miles per hour, or slower.[i]
But once you hit the open road of the highway and your speed starts to increase, aerodynamics become a factor. Go over 45 miles per hour and open windows will create drag, reducing fuel efficiency by 10 percent. Go over 55 miles per hour with your windows down and you’ll reduce fuel efficiency by 20 percent. [ii]
Fuel costs account for 28-30% of most fleet’s budgets. Considering how much fuel costs, this makes reducing fuel consumption one of the most important issues facing fleet managers. Culprits such as prolonged idling and excessive speeding make driver behavior the number one factor in fuel consumption.
A speed and idling monitoring solution allows managers to monitor idling, instances of excessive speed, and unauthorized use of their fleet vehicles. Armed with this information, they can address wasteful driver behaviors to significantly reduce the amount of fuel consumed by their fleet and save their company money.
An urban paratransit agency that recently began piloting a speed a monitoring system was immediately able to identify over 17 hours of unnecessary idling per vehicle in a single week. This costs the agency almost $35 per vehicle, per week in wasted fuel. Extended to their 650 vehicle fleet, the agency would waste more than $1.6 million dollars a year in fuel from excess idling.
The results are in. Monitoring your fleet’s activities is one of the easiest ways to lower your operating costs. With the release of Mentor Fleet Monitor early in 2010, we’ve been running pilot projects with a variety of clients. Here are some of their preliminary findings:
Idling Monitoring
A major utility company piloting idling monitoring on seven vehicles identified that between $45 and $134 was wasted in fuel each month from unnecessary idling. When extended to their 4500 vehicle fleet, unnecessary idling would cost the company over $86,000 in wasted fuel per month. A 50% reduction in idling, accomplished by identifying negative driver behaviors with the information provided in the idling monitoring reports, would result in a cost savings of more than $500,000 a year.
Speed Monitoring
Using speed monitoring on a nine vehicle subset of their fleet, a major urban paratransit agency identified over 1400 speed threshold violations in one week. Their reports showed that drivers reached a top speed of 87 miles per hour, 32 miles per hour over the pre-set limit. Drivers travelling at these speeds would cost the agency anadditional $1.28 per gallon of gas, not to mention significantly increasing the risk of an accident. According to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), each five miles per hour above the speed limit has the net effect of increasing the cost of a gallon of gas by twenty cents.
Automatic Vehicle Location
A Canadian paratransit agency implemented AVL technology to monitor a twelve vehicle subset of their fleet and optimize driving behaviors. The agency eliminated over 140 unnecessary miles each month. Projected to the 17 vehicle fleet, using AVL to optimize routing will save the agency over 2400 miles or 173 gallons of fuel over a year.
Using fuel cost-effectively can be a challenge for fleet-based organizations. Fuel is responsible for one of the highest operating costs of transportation businesses, and managing this expense is even more important when prices are fluctuating. BUS Ride has a useful article on fuel management systems. Read it here.
This fun animated demo explains how speed and idling monitoring works, how it saves you money, and illustrates what kind of ROI you can expect. Click here to check it out.
Located in picturesque Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Island Pumping provides concrete pumping services to not only the city of Nanaimo, but all of Vancouver Island. President and Owner, Rick Mayer, founded Island Pumping in 1988. Since then, Island Pumping has seen continuous growth and expansion. Rick has been involved in the construction industry all his life and has some great experiences to share with us today.
1. Why did you decide to invest in a fleet management solution?
Before this system was in place we relied on drivers to keep track of their hours, to write down when they arrived or left a job site, and we billed by the hour. With our equipment costing $125 to $230 per hour, the minutes can add up. We were losing an average of 15 minutes per job, which translates to about $100,000 a year.
We also had some problems with security. On a couple of occasions, we found vehicles in places they weren’t supposed to be, doing jobs they weren’t supposed to be doing. Because of this, we had to implement security policies where the trucks returned to the yard each night. This wasn’t cost effective, but we didn’t have another option. With the new system, we can have trucks in different cities and there is never a need to bring the vehicle back. This saves us money on fuel, and wear and tear on the vehicles. It also allows us to be much more productive, as we are spending our time at the job site as opposed to driving.
Also, our dispatch system wasn’t at the level it could be. It took a lot of guesswork and was time consuming. Our new system lets us track the vehicles and what stage they are at in the job. Sensors feed back to dispatch and we know, for example, that the truck is pumping or washing out. We don’t have to bother the driver anymore because we always know what they’re doing.
2. What one piece of advice would you give someone considering a similar technology purchase?
Be prepared for a lot of work, and find a company that is very supportive. You need a company who will be there for you if you need to pick up the phone for help at ten o’clock at night. Once you get started on a project like this you’ve got to keep it moving forward. You need to find companies that are willing to put in that effort with you.
3. How has your organization changed since implementing this technology?
We discovered that before this system was in place, two operators doing the same job could each be using a different billing format, making it hard for customers to understand their bill. For example, say one of our operators had a problem onsite, and decided to give the customer a free wash out. They wouldn’t necessarily write that on the bill so customers wouldn’t realize they were getting a discount.
We are much more standardized now, and customers really like that. If the same scenario happened today the operator tells dispatch about the discount and dispatch issues a credit on the bill in real-time. By the time the operator prints the bill out onsite, the discount is already on the bill and the customer can see they’re getting a break. Being able to present the bill correctly in the field and instantly having that information back in the office is great. Literally seconds after the job is done, the dispatcher is able to print out the invoice and mail it. That’s a key benefit.
4. What do your customers think of the system?
Customers are enjoying the technology. It’s made us a premier choice because everything we do now looks professional. The bill isn’t someone’s chicken scratch on a piece of paper. It’s printed out professionally, it is dated and time stamped, and the customer just has to sign it.
There has definitely been a reduction in customer complaints. Now we have a reliable way of backing up our invoicing because we can pull the detailed ticket if needed. We don’t get any calls about invoicing concerns because customers know they are being billed accurately.
5. What do your drivers think of the system?
Occasionally we’ve had to assign drivers to an older truck that doesn’t have the in-vehicle computer installed yet and they’re lost! I even experienced this myself in an older truck, where I went out to a job site without any billing paperwork or anything [laughs]. With the computer in the truck, everything is right there. My stress level goes right down. I hop in the truck, print out my pre-trip, do my work, finish the job, and hit print ticket. I don’t even have to remember what time I got there!
Time-wise, drivers are probably saving at least thirty minutes to one hour per day because there is so much less paperwork. The system makes our drivers’ jobs a lot less stressful as the hassle of filing paperwork is eliminated. We actually had a field operator who came to work for us from a competitor because we were using this system.
6. Have you seen a Return on Investment? If so, how much and how quickly?
We saw a return on investment instantly. At the beginning, we had the drivers hand-write bills like they always did and then we compared them with the printouts from the mobile computer. We started finding discrepancies in time and charges right away. Sometimes they’d just forgotten to write things on the bill. We stopped using the hand written bills immediately.
We are now able to very accurately predict how much time it will take to complete a job. Customers then know what to expect. There is an industry standard to charge a minimum number of hours per job, but we have been able to eliminate this because we are much more efficient now. If everything was status quo with the economy, I expect we would be saving between $50,000 and $100,000 per year with this technology.
We also used to have two people working to dispatch job assignments. Now there is hardly enough work for one person. There is less congestion for dispatchers as they can continually send jobs to drivers to be stored on their in-vehicle computer instead of having to reach them by phone.
And finally, we’re able to expand our business. We’ve remotely located trucks in different areas, and we couldn’t have done this before. It gives us a real edge. Being able to track the equipment, where our operators are, and where they have been, all from the office gives us peace of mind that we won’t be taken advantage of. The long-term use of the technology will probably save us millions of dollars because we won’t have to invest the money into opening new offices in order to expand our business.
To learn more about Island Pumping’s technology solution, click here.
Speeding might get your drivers where they need to go a little bit quicker, but what are the real costs of this behavior for your organization? Take a look at these ROI numbers, and you might be surprised:
Each mile per hour above 50 mph increases fuel consumption by 1.5% percent. A truck, which averages 8 mpg at 50 mph, will average 6.8 mpg at 60 mph. (Argonne National Laboratories)
Increasing speed from 55 to 75 mph can increase fuel consumption by 39%, while cutting the effectiveness of fuel-efficient tires by 27%, (2009, Bridgestone Americas Tire Operations, LLC, Real Answers Magazine, Volume 13, Issue 3)
By tracking and controlling driver speeding behavior, a company can reduce accidents by a significant percentage. An accident reduction of 5% for a 50-vehicle fleet amounts to nearly 3 fewer accidents each year. The total savings available is between $18,000 and $36,000 annually. (“Fleet ‘Soft Costs’ Can be Measured and Addressed,” in Automotive Fleet Magazine, June 2006.)
Hello everyone! There’s lots of talk out there about monitoring idling as a way to cut costs. For our first post, I thought we’d get right into some ROI numbers to give you food for thought:
According to the DOT, an average truck burns 0.9 gallons of fuel per hour idling. A typical owner with 5 vehicles idling for about 1 hour a day is wasting 4.5 gallons of fuel each day. At an average fuel cost of $5.67 US per gallon, that’s $25.54 US a day, $127.72 a week and $6,641.44 US a year. (GEOTrac)
60 minutes of idling is equivalent to between 80 and 120 minutes of driving time. The resulting loss of fuel economy from excessive idling can add up to 800 gallons of fuel annually for the average truck. (Argonne National Laboratories)
Reducing idle time by 10% increases efficiency by 1 mpg to 2 mpg, and most fleets achieve more than a 55% reduction in idle time within 6 weeks of implementing a GPS fleet management program. A fleet of 5 vehicles loses, on average, around $1600 per year, per vehicle, by not managing engine idling. (Integrated Solutions, January 2008)
A blog for those of us who live and work in fleet management. Topics include engine diagnostics, driver safety, mobile workforce management, CAD/AVL, vehicle maintenance, truck distribution, global computing, work order management, and field services.
Free White Paper: Decreasing Driver Distraction
With driver distraction being a leading cause of vehicle accidents, selecting an in-vehicle computer for your fleet that lets you control when drivers/device interaction is crucial to your fleet’s safety, as well as your bottom line.
