In the day-to-day struggles of a fleet manager, one of the major repetitive items he or she has to contend with is fuel, its cost, how it’s purchased, how it’s paid for, were the charges correct, and were they billed to the right depart-ment.

With today’s fuel prices escalating, and no end no end in sight, a fleet man-ager must have a comprehensive fuel management program in place to insure that his organization is receiving its monies worth for the fuel dollars ex-pended. Such a program should yield multiple data fields that can be utilized to track and analyze all of your vehicle cost and performance data, including life cycle data.

Where to Start Gaining Control

Today, the simplest and most cost- ef-fective way to accomplish the task, is to enroll your fleet, regardless of size, in a managed fuel program. For the sake of clarification, let’s define a managed fuel program as one that has total controls available and provides full fleet data capture and reporting, ie. universal fuel cards, oil co. cards, and bank fleet cards.

There are numerous highly reputable and sound companies that would be willing to do a complete analysis of your company’s assets and needs, and design a custom program that provides your operation with as much or as little as you require to make your fleet cost effective and fuel efficient.

It has long been a mis-conception that fuel management pro-grams are an expensive white elephant that can’t possibly be cost effective or aid in any way in efficiency. As this se-ries of articles progresses, AF hopes to show you that the monies saved through a managed program will more than bal-ance out any actual cost of the program.

AF’s research shows there are numer-ous methods of fuel purchasing and payment throughout the industry, some up to date while others are a little behind the power curve.

Fueling arrangements covered a wide range of options: all types of credit cards, house accounts at gas stations, expense accounts, cash re-imbursement and some used petty cash assets.

Before proceeding with the pros and cons of managed systems, let’s review some figures indicating the numbers of fleets that are on managed systems, and look at those by fleet size and makeup. 

Small Fleets: 25 to 99 Vehicles 

AF’s research shows that in fleets of 25 to 99 vehicles, 59 percent of the fleets responding were on a managed program.

Medium Fleets: 100 to 499 Vehicles

Fleets with 100 to 499 vehicles showed a little higher on the managed side with 62 percent using a managed system and 38 percent not.

Larger Fleets: 500 to 999 Vehicles

Little change was reflected in fleets with 300 to 999 vehicles, with 58 percent on a program and 42 percent not.

Fleets of 1,000+ Saw the Light

The next group surveyed were companies with more than 1,000 vehicles.

Those responding showed a marked in-crease in fuel program participation, with 82 percent involved and only 18 percent still looking for that better mousetrap. For this article, fuel cost was set at $1.95 per gallon--autos at 22,893 miles per year at 18 mpg and light trucks at 28,515 miles per year at 14.3 mpg. This is the first in a series of four articles on managed fuel programs vs. no fuel programs.