Five Steps to Reducing Your Pump Price Pain
2. Engage associates. Engaging associates in the search for fuel savings has the highest return on investment. Engage your associates on how they could increase their miles per gallon performance. Help them learn improved driving behavior with professional instructions on driving best practices like measured-starts from stops, obeying the speed limit and packing a truck for a full day of deliveries or work. Engage your suppliers who might offer their best practices advice for free. The other part of engagement is human motivation. Associates like to contribute their ideas. Open up the process for reducing pump pain by asking for their suggestions. Let the group figure out best practices and manage their implementation. Try making this a game. Let the group set the rules and reward success. The idea is to create a team effort that rewards all when the team wins by reducing your companys fuel costs. For most companies this path delivers lower fuel costs within 90 days or less.
3. Invest in vehicle tracking devices. All the big fleets use this. It takes measuring down to the individual and individual vehicle levels. It provides data that can be used to improve human behavior. It will surface cost-effective vehicle maintenance.
4. Buy more fuel-efficient vehicles. Pump prices are making the investment in fuel-efficient vehicles more attractive. Leases and other sources of capital are exceptionally low in cost for companies with good credit. Have your CPA or accountant do the math on the financial paybacks created from fuel savings achieved by using more fuel-efficient vehicles. If your fleet operates in a spoke-and-wheel type of system where they leave and return each day to the same location then investigate natural gas as a lower cost and emissions fuel alternative.
5. Go digital. Digital technologies can increase worker efficiency plus reduce vehicle use. One example is a company that provides building pest control services through two key customer-facing work associates. One associate provides pest protection services. The other is a termite specialist. They do not have a mobile digital connection. So when one sees something at a customer site involving a concern for the other specialist the solution is a second service trip. The alternative would be for each specialist to be connected via iPads that can access a cloud database housing all customer records, notes and photos. The digital solution will increase coordination, improve customer services and decrease fuel costs by reducing the need for unneeded site inspections.
