Smart Routing Software (more than just fuel savings…)

by | Oct 14, 2015 | Uncategorized

One of the hardest situations for a start up business is figuring out how to expand while keeping expenses down. Small businesses have a great deal on their table from managing the growth of employees to saving on operational expenses. At some point owners need to step back and look at what has to be done and whether they are able to solve difficult organizational situations or hire someone that knows what they are doing.

A start up courier company in Melbourne, Easy Deliveries, needed to figure out a better way to make deliveries based on logistics. With well over 200 delivery points, 30 plus drivers along with a few dispatchers there had to be a better way to get everything organized and delivered in a timely manner. Scheduling and planning each route manually proved not only exhausting, but way too time consuming with no clear solutions.

The start up company understood there were just not enough hours in the day to manually plan Weighing all resources and the money needed to get goods delivered in a timely fashion, manual planning was just not a good solution.

Easy Deliveries approached the team at Swift for help and they were more than pleased to work with the company. Swift said they would put together a very workable, efficient routing solution to get products moved, save the company money and cut back on fueling charges.

Easy Deliveries was facing the same problems that many businesses face, not having access to routing solutions. Unless you are a company like UPS or FedEx, you just don’t have the ability to do this on your own. You need to rely on people who know how to move products or valuable information passing between businesses to businesses.

Route Optimization Solutions:

Swift offered a clear and concise solution in Route Optimization and the results were astonishing! Easy Deliveries’ office team had spent well over 5 hrs manually setting up their drivers’ routes. Trying to calculate the number of cars and drivers, they realized their drivers would been on the road for 17 hrs a day! These hours were just not acceptable for their drivers or the company.

Swift came back with optimized routes within a matter of minutes and bringing the number of cars needed way down and saving travel time down to 8 hrs. which is an amazing 47.06% savings in distance, fuel and time!

Swift has offered the most amazing solution for developing efficient routes that do not involve any form of manual calculations. Easy Deliveries could have spent hours and days trying to move their cars to all points and still not have come up with something even close to what Swift developed. On top of that, it only took Swift a few minutes to make this happen.

Easy Deliveries is getting their goods to warehouses, stores and everywhere else on time and saving a great deal of money on fuel and manpower. With any start up company, lower costs can lead to bigger growth. As the business grows, so will their fleet, employees and their routes will increase as well. Easy Deliveries knows for new strategies and the best routes for expansion, they can rely on Swift for all their solutions.

How Fleet Management Software Can Improve Fuel Efficiency

by | Oct 8, 2015 | Uncategorized

From our friends at Softwareadvice.com —

Volatile gas prices, bad drivers, employee error and fraud: These are the bane of any organization that relies on fleets of vehicles (plus the fuel to power them), to conduct business. To better understand the challenges fleet managers and transportation accountants face when it comes to optimizing fuel efficiency in their fleets, we conducted a survey of transportation industry professionals.

In this report, you’ll learn how the issues mentioned above affect your peers—and how fleet management software can help improve fuel efficiency and streamline operations.

Key Findings:

  1. More than half of respondents (53 percent, combined) say that fuel costs exceed projections “somewhat” or “very frequently.”
  2. A majority (54 percent, combined) say they are either “somewhat” or “very concerned” about fuel theft occurring in their fleet.
  3. Twenty-seven percent of survey respondents say that improved data collection and analytics is a top benefit of fleet management software.
  4. Another 27 percent say that improved budgeting is a major advantage of using a fleet management solution.
  5. Seventeen percent of respondents say enhanced employee monitoring capabilities is a worthwhile benefit of fleet management software.

Introduction

Volatile fuel prices are a fact of life in the business world. Consider the chart below: Over the past 20 years, gas prices have fluctuated wildly, between approximately $1 and $4 a gallon.

Just as spikes in gas prices can hit average Americans hard in their pocketbooks, they can be disastrous for companies in the transportation industry (or that otherwise rely heavily on transportation to move their goods from coast to coast).

Compounding the problem for many businesses is the issue of employee fraud and error when it comes to reporting fuel costs. Some truck drivers have gone to elaborate lengths to steal fuel (and presumably short-change the company they’re driving for).

Meanwhile, in the back office, fleet managers, accountants and dispatchers may simply make errors when calculating costs as a result of how they track fuel expenses.

As such, firms relying heavily on transportation are looking for every way to mitigate loss. We conducted a survey of accountants, owners, dispatchers, delivery coordinators and fleet managers in transportation, logistics and distribution about the challenges they face and the benefits they see from using fleet management software. Here’s what we found.

Accurately Projecting Fuel Costs Is a Top Pain Point

Among survey respondents, more than half (53 percent) indicate that fuel costs exceed projections “somewhat” or “very frequently.” Actual fuel costs can exceed projections for a variety of reasons: Obviously, gas prices can fluctuate wildly. Beyond that, however, a firm’s fuel costs can exceed projections due to:

  • Accounting errors
  • Inefficient route planning
  • Road work, traffic
  • Poor driver behavior (such as hard braking or excessive idling)
  • Theft or fraud

Often, a firm might purchase a “fixed forward” contract with a fuel supplier, which allows it to buy gas at a fixed rate for a set period of time. Such contracts can be a gamble: While they guarantee a consistent price, which helps with budgeting, firms can lose out when gas prices experience significant and unexpected drops.

For some fleet managers, negotiating and managing such contracts is a difficult process, as there are many influencing factors to consider—including current and projected fuel prices, projected shipment volume, projected fuel consumption and so on.

“The company is supposed to work with a fuel supplier for discounts, and that is not always easy to deal with, which makes a big impact on the overall costs of fuel,” says one of our survey respondents, a fleet manager at a transportation company. “It takes some time to get the cost totaled.”

Fleet managers that lack a proper fleet management system often have to manually enter in a large volume of data—receipts, mileages, transactions and so on—in order to come up with projected costs. Using fleet management software, however, much of those tasks are automated. Not only does this reduce errors, it also allows fleet managers to view all relevant data in one place.

Many fleet management systems are able to integrate with fuel payment services, making it easier for fleet managers to track expenses and ensure that nothing is amiss.

“[Our system] takes a transaction file from the fuel card provider and uploads each transaction into our fuel log portion of the software,” says Robert Edilson, marketing director at Collective Data, a fleet management software vendor.

“It tracks cost of fillup, units, fuel type and meter readings. The meter readings coming through the fuel log will drive the preventative maintenance section of the software as well as factor into the replacement cost calculations in the software.”

Fuel Theft a Concern for Over Half of Respondents

Fuel theft can occur in many ways. Sometimes, it might be as simple as a driver inflating how much he spent on fuel to his fleet manager and providing no receipt. But schemes can get more complex than that. For example, a driver could use his company’s fuel card to purchase fuel at a discount for another driver who pays him back at a cut rate, coming up with a false explanation for the additional fuel charge to his company.

Even with procedures and policies in place to prevent theft, it can be a challenge to enforce them.

“It is difficult for us to impose the rules that we have about documenting fuel costs,” says another survey respondent, an accountant at a contracting firm that operates a fleet of heavy construction vehicles.

“The drivers may not be totally compliant to our requests. They may not always save the receipts or the associated documentation. It is sometimes hard to track the cost accurately.”

Fleet management software assists with preventing fuel theft because it is able to provide incredibly accurate estimates for how much fuel should be consumed in a given situation, taking into account:

  • The make and model of the truck
  • The distance of the trip
  • The route taken
  • The load of the truck
  • The driver’s behavior

The user can then compare the actual fuel cost against the estimate based on this data. Some systems can even alert the user automatically if there are repeated discrepancies or suspicious patterns.

In addition to preventing theft, fleet management software is able to monitor and identify other bad behavior on the part of the driver. Typically used in conjunction with a hardware device placed in the truck, the software can relay GPS location, frequency of hard braking, driving speed and so on to the back office. This gives users critical data that allows them to objectively evaluate their drivers, and tell them how they can improve their fuel efficiency while driving.

Benefits of Fleet Management Software

Finally, we asked our survey respondents an open-ended question about the benefits they have seen from using fleet management software, and coded the responses into different benefit categories. (Of our original sample, two-thirds of respondents are using a formal fleet management system.)

Improvements in budgeting, data collection and fuel-cost estimating are the most significant benefits users experience from using fleet management software. Without a proper fleet management system, a user will typically rely on a hodgepodge of spreadsheets, basic accounting software and, often, a lot of guesswork to put together a budget.

Here’s an example: Say you are managing a fleet of 10 semi-trucks that will collectively drive 100,000 miles in one month. The trucks’ fuel efficiency is highly dependent on how heavy its load is, the driver’s behavior, the conditions it’s driving in and how frequently it must contend with traffic. Thus, fuel efficiency could fluctuate from anywhere between four miles per gallon and eight miles per gallon. The gas prices during this time period will also fluctuate—let’s say between $2 and $3 per gallon.

The total fuel cost in our hypothetical month could thus be anywhere between $25,000 and $75,000: a huge variation. What fleet management software is able to do is take a lot of the guesswork out of the equation. By optimizing routes and relying on algorithms that can predict fuel efficiency based on load size, traffic patterns and driver behavior—in addition to feeding in the most accurate predictions for future gas prices—this software can significantly narrow the estimated fuel cost range.

Conclusions

For now, fully electric semi-trucks and autonomous semi-trucks appear to be a ways off from widespread adoption. Until then, fleets must rely on fossil-fueled trucks driven by imperfect meatbags. While nailing fuel costs down to the dollar will always prove to be a difficult task, a proper fleet management system can go a long way in taking out the guesswork and providing increased visibility into a fleet’s operations.

Further Commentary from GetSwift:

What are the fuel and wage savings that come from smart dispatching and routing software?

Routing and dispatching systems are getting much more intelligent. They’re not just factoring in the shortest distance between point A and point B, they’re factoring in traffic, road work, weather conditions and so on. Obviously, the less time a driver spends stuck in traffic means less money spent on fuel and wages. Beyond that, there have been a lot of interesting advances with these systems. There are some new systems that allow fleets to essentially network with each other to determine where their shipments can be consolidated in order to prevent “empty” miles from being driven. So if a truck delivers a shipment from point A to point B and is heading back to point A, the empty space in the trailer is listed in a marketplace of sorts and is leased out to a third party shipper if they need a delivery made from point B back to point A.

How does live tracking in fleet management software help reduce missed deliveries?

The more data that a fleet manager is privy to, the more intelligent decisions he or she can make. With live tracking features, they can identify where the bottle necks in their operations are and also determine if their drivers are at fault. A lot of delivery services offer a customer-facing live tracking map, which helps to ensure that both parties have an accurate idea as to when a delivery will be made.