Benefits of Fuel Monitoring System

June 24, 2020

With fuel prices trying to reach new heights, it is essential to be mindful of fuel consumption and the subsequent costs. As a fleet manager, your first priority is to save as much money as possible while utilizing your fleet to its full potential. And the data suggests that fuel accounts for one of the major operational expenditures incurred by fleet owners. So it is crucial to understand the benefits of fuel monitoring software and have a cutting-edge fuel monitoring system integrated with your fleet management software

In simple terms, Fuel Monitoring System is a system that summarises and analyses fuel-related information about the vehicle. In addition to this, it takes all the required measures to identify and prevent misuse of the fuel as well as help in maintaining fuel costs.

The problem with most fleet management software in the market is that most of them don’t provide fuel monitoring systems. In some of the cases, they provide a very basic fuel module which is not ideal for analyzing large fleet data. So, what if we can integrate our advanced fleet management software with such an advanced fuel monitoring system? This way we can bring the best of the two in one place. It will save you time as well as complexity.

Advanced Fuel Monitoring System of Trakzee

Uffizio is coming up with an advanced fuel monitoring module integrated with its advanced fleet management software Trakzee with great benefits of fuel monitoring system. While designing this module, we reached out to our customers all over the globe and gathered information about what are their major pain points and what are their priorities. After carefully analyzing their requirements, we have come up with a whole new approach to solve this problem. To understand it better, let us look at the challenges in developing this module.

Challenges in designing an Advanced Fuel Monitoring System :

1. Movable vs Immovable Objects: Monitoring fuel consumption for immovable machines is quite easy as we can measure the fuel value from the connected device directly. But what about the vehicles which are moving all the time? Monitoring and utilizing fuel consumption accurately in these vehicles is a complex process.

Because there are various factors in moving vehicles that impact fuel consumption. So, for a monitoring system to be effective and accurate, it is very important to take them all into consideration.

These Parameters include:

i) Idling time of the vehicle throughout the day, week and month.

ii) Bad driving behavior habits like Harsh Acceleration, Harsh braking, and sharp cornering made by the driver throughout the working time.

iii) AC misuse by the driver.

iv) Road conditions, condition of the vehicle, load on the vehicle, and the efficiency of the engine of the vehicle.

Trakzee’s fuel monitoring system considers all these parameters in order to provide the most accurate fuel analytics of the fleet. This makes our fuel monitoring module versatile in a true sense.

2. Inbuilt Fuel Sensors vs No Fuel Sensors: Also, some of the GPS trackers provide inbuilt fuel sensors. In this case, we can analyze fuel data with high accuracy. But what if your GPS tracker doesn’t provide inbuilt fuel sensors? How can you monitor your fleet’s fuel-related activities in that case?

Don’t worry. We have got you covered with that as well. Our advanced fuel module will still be able to calculate and generate all the fuel analytics with the help of artificial intelligence-based algorithms. This makes our fuel module “Advanced” in a true sense.

3. Single Fuel Tank vs Multiple Fuel Tanks Monitoring: How to monitor fuel data if the vehicle has multiple fuel tanks? In this type of situation, we can not measure the fuel by the conventional method. Mostly large container ships often face this problem.

To solve this problem, we have enhanced our fuel module and added a facility to configure multiple fuel sensors. From these sensors, we can monitor multiple fuel tank data as well. So that you do not have to worry about monitoring the fuel of your fleet irrespective of fleet type or fleet size.

Enough of the lengthy explanation. Let us now understand how our fuel monitoring system can help you out in managing your fleet while maintaining costs through one simple example.

Example

Let us assume that you are managing a fleet of more than 1000 vehicles. Your expenditure is increasing day by day but you don’t know the actual reason behind it. There can be various factors affecting this increased cost.

Your drivers might be misusing the AC or doing abnormal idling. Some of your drivers might be driving with bad habits like harsh acceleration or harsh braking. Your vehicles might be not serviced from time to time and therefore not working on the optimal performance. Fuel might be getting stolen on a regular basis. Proper loading capacity standards might not be followed. And many more. As you can see, it can be a tedious and cumbersome process if one needs to monitor all these things manually in large fleets.

But at the same time, these are some of the cases which will affect your overall business cost heavily. So it is important to keep track of them. Now let’s say you are using Trakzee – Advanced fleet management software. With its fully-featured Advanced Fuel Monitoring System, you can easily get rid of all the problems mentioned above.

For example, with our fuel consumption chart, you can easily visualize your fleet’s fuel consumption pattern. The normal pattern looks like the below :

In this graph, you can see the gradual decrease in fuel consumption which is perfectly normal. Also, you can see additional information like the time of refill, the location of the refill point as well as the running duration of the vehicle, and more.

But if there is a fuel theft in any of your vehicles then the graph will look something like this.

Here you can see that there is a steep fall from one point to the next one. Which is not a gradual decrease. It shows fuel thefts. You will also get the information about the vehicle number, time of the fuel theft, amount of fuel that is stolen, etc. This way you will be able to visualize and pinpoint the problem very easily and act accordingly.

This is one of the many features Trakzee’s Advanced Fuel Monitoring System provides.