Posts Tagged ‘fuel consumption’
Thursday, January 26th, 2012
Guest Blogger Info:
Today’s guest post comes to us from Derek Singleton, ERP Analyst at Software Advice. Software Advice helps buyers find the right software for their business by constantly publish product profiles, comparisons, best practices guides and other research to their website. Experts are also available by phone to provide free consultations for software buyers.
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Article:
Over the last few years, everyone has been feeling the pinch from the rising cost of fuel. Many businesses and fuel procurement offices have assumed that if they could just get past a couple of tough years, that fuel costs will stabilize. If there’s one thing that’s become clear over couple year, it’s that high oil prices are here to stay. 2011 set a record for highest average inflation-adjusted fuel price, and 2012 is projected to keep pace with those levels.
While the high cost of fuel can be a vexing problem for businesses everywhere, it’s can be a major obstacle for shippers and carriers. Luckily, there are a few things that companies that manage a fleet can do to manage the rise in fuel prices. Here are two ways that companies help reduce the impact of high fuel prices on their bottom line.
Improve Procurement of Fuel
One of the main trends that we’ve seen in the oil and gas market over the last couple of years is increasing volatility. It’s not uncommon for the market to swing five cents per gallon on a given day. If you find yourself on the wrong side of a purchasing decision when buying thousands of gallons of gas, you can quickly bleed money and go over budget. There are some automated solutions, such as FuelQuest, on the market that can help companies forecast demand, monitor on-hand fuel, and procure at the best market price. These solutions can help companies avoid buying at the wrong time and bolster their bottom lines-and they can often save four to six cents per gallon on fuel purchases.
Better Manage Your Fleet
After making better fuel purchasing decisions, better managing the fleet is a logical next step. While there are some very impressive new technologies (e.g. eco-friendly engines and aerodynamic trailers) on the market, these can be pricey investments. Where companies can get a far better bang for their buck is in employing highly-skilled drivers that are versed in fuel saving technique such as smooth acceleration and momentum control. A skilled driver can save, on average, anywhere from five to 20 percent in fuel efficiency. Another boon is keeping tire pressures at proper inflation levels as a three percent variance in air pressure impacts fuel efficiency by one percent.
Plan Routes More Intelligently
A final way save on fuel costs is to better plan the way that shipments are delivered. This boils down to both delivering along more efficient manner routes as well as shipping loads more efficiently. There are a number of technology solutions that have been developed to help fleets shave off fuel costs by planning routes that require fewer miles and fewer stops. One of my favorite examples of how effective route planning technologies can be is how UPS saved on fuel costs by minimizing the number of left-hand turns that drivers make. While was just a minor change in the way UPS delivered their packages, it ultimately wound up saving them more than 10 million gallons of gas.
These are just a couple of ideas on how to save on fuel costs. For more strategies to reduce fuel costs, you can visit the Software Advice – an online resource for distribution business software. The original post can be viewed at: Three Strategies for Reducing Fuel Costs in 2012.
To learn more about Fleet Management technologies that help fleet managers increase efficiencies and decrease costs such as those incurred by speeding, idling, and poor driving habits click here.
Friday, February 4th, 2011
Here’s a news article from APTA that looks at recent data concerning traffic congestion and the role public transit plays in reducing it. According to the most recent Texas Transportation Institute (TTI) report, without public transit, travelers would have suffered an additional 785 million hours of delay on US roads and consumed 640 million more gallons of fuel in 2010. These kinds of numbers speak to the effectiveness of public transit for the good of everyone. One has to wonder, what could the nation accomplish with an extra 785 million hours?
Click here to read the article in full.
Friday, October 29th, 2010
If you think fleet management technology only benefits companies with large fleets, think again. Here is a great article from Integrated Solutions (September 2010) that discusses how fleets of any size can benefit from fleet management technology. The article explains how the benefits of a fleet management solution – reduced operating costs and increased efficiencies – are seen across large and small fleets alike.
How can smaller sized fleets afford a fleet management solution? One of the reasons put forth is that the technology has come down in cost, making it more accessible to more budgets. But a lower price point is not the only reason for deploying a fleet management solution: improving your bottom line is also a compelling reason.
A fleet management solution can improve your bottom line through speed and idling monitoring, which save on fuel costs, real-time information, which helps you make better, more informed decisions, and more efficient dispatching, just to name a few.
Click here to read the entire article. To learn more about fleet management solution options out there, go here.
Monday, October 18th, 2010
It’s not the best pun, but it’s certainly fitting. Drivers who make “fuellish” decisions are ones who can cost organizations millions of dollars a year simply by leaving their engines running when their vehicles are not in use.
An article by Mike Antich on Automotive-Fleet.com discusses how, in addition to simply wasting gas, vehicles that idle for an hour also add the equivalent of forty miles of engine wear-and-tear. Multiply that by five and suddenly your vehicles have driven an extra 200 miles in a single week. Extrapolate that figure to a year and a vehicle has traveled over 10,000 miles going nowhere.
It’s not hard to see how costly this type of driver behavior is to an organization. If you’d like to learn more about the hidden costs of poor driver decisions, the article can be read here.
If you’d like to view a short demo on how expensive an idling vehicle can be for your fleet, click here.
Wednesday, May 19th, 2010
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.
Download: It’s Easy Being Green
Tuesday, May 11th, 2010
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.
Save money. Buy regular.
Thursday, April 15th, 2010
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]
[i] http://www.bankrate.com/finance/auto/will-rolling-down-windows-save-fuel-or-not.aspx
[ii] http://www.bankrate.com/finance/auto/will-rolling-down-windows-save-fuel-or-not.aspx
Wednesday, April 7th, 2010
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.
Click here to download a white paper to learn more about reducing fuel consumption and how a telematics solution can help.
Monday, March 22nd, 2010
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 an additional $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.
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
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.
