Establishing a strong presence in the construction industry requires every aspect of your operation to be optimized, including fuel costs and management. Mismanaged fuel can end up costing millions annually, depending on the size of your fleet. Much like a house, an effective fuel management software is built with four key pieces:
- Foundation – Efficiency
- Walls – Security
- Floor – Customer Service
- Roof – Wet Hosing Capabilities
Let’s look at how these four pieces come together to build an effective solution.
Foundation – Efficiency
If a house’s foundation is old, broken, unstable or (even worse) non-existent, the house is a catastrophe waiting to happen. There could be a wet season, or the house could topple in a hurricane or tornado, or even break apart if the ground shifts.
Likewise, if your fuel management solution is broken, glitch-ridden or non-existent, it’s inefficient and pointless. Even worse, it may cause serious problems later on if you need to audit your payments or check fueling history for trends and ways to optimize. An effective fuel management software solution will ensure that you experience ROI with a system that can accurately record all fueling transaction data and analyze trends in real time so that your construction organization can thrive.
Walls – Security
If you’re making a large purchase on a house, you probably are checking to make sure its security is up to date – walls, doors, windows and locks should all be working and sturdy. Well if you’re in charge of fueling for your fleet, you’ve surely run into issues with fuel theft, whether it’s from internal or external sources. Effective fuel management systems will come equipped with features that assign vehicle identification devices that will sync up and communicate with the fuel pumps and controllers. This interaction can be used to ensure a number of things, including:
- The vehicle is using the correct kind of fuel.
- The person operating the pump is authorized to fuel.
- The person (or the vehicle) has not exceeded their fuel limit you’ve enacted for that time frame.
- One fueling session does not include multiple receiving vehicles.
Floor – Customer Support
When constructing a house, you can’t expect to satisfy your client if you don’t include a floor. The floor needs to support you, and it should change depending on your needs: a bathroom will have easy to clean and water-resistant tile, a living room may have carpet for comfortable lounging and so on.
An effective fuel management solution will come with a customer support team that is committed to solving all of your problems as fast as possible, and will be available 24/7. The team won’t just work on one area either – they can help with software questions, hardware issues and system optimization. In addition, the software supplier will continue to support optimizing your operations through updates, fixes and new features that you’ll enjoy.
Roof – Wet Hosing Capabilities
There’s one more key feature that’s missing: a roof. Just like a house wouldn’t be worth living in without a roof, a fuel management system wouldn’t be worth investing in if it didn’t offer wet hosing capabilities. Besides the obvious speed benefits of wet hosing in the construction industry, it also offers increased security and accuracy in fueling. With mobile identification devices connected to the heavy equipment, you can remain confident that the fuel dispensed from the tankers is going exactly where it says it is.
In addition, construction work does not have to stop for the vehicle to return to a fueling stop, which results in increased optimization of work hours. However, the benefits don’t stop there; using a mobile fueling tanker that only needs to be in certain locations when it is required to be helps to reduce environmental and safety concerns that might otherwise exist with an above- or below-ground fuel tank system.
Only a fuel management software that is built on these four key pieces can promote confident, effective fueling practices and help your construction operations succeed through savings. FuelDrive, powered by AssetWorks, is an automated fleet fuel management system that supports continuous, real-time fuel management over virtually any communication platform. It uses powerful software to improve data accuracy, capture real-time data at the pump, increase security and improve your overall fueling operations. FuelDrive offers all of the key pieces above along with additional features!
