Reactive Fuel Management is a Full-Time Job You Never Asked For

For many years as a Fleet Manager, now as a consultant I’ve watched the exact same process occur in counties, cities, and agencies of all sizes. On Monday morning, a fleet manager sits with a full plate of “real” work: acquisition of vehicles, maintenance planning, staffing, budget preparation. Yet, instead of addressing any of these critical tasks, they spend the majority of the day responding to last week’s fuel exceptions. This cycle never stops; it simply continues.

This is the impact of reactive fuel management on an operation. Instead of being the individuals responsible for operating a fleet, they become the individuals who explain how the fleet operated. While there is a significant difference between these two roles, many organizations fail to recognize the distinction. Organizations pay the costs associated with this type of management quietly, on a week-by-week basis, and refer to this as “business-as-usual.”

The Problem with Cleaning Up
When fuel data is received in batches (i.e., end-of-day, next morning, end-of-week), your first response will always be to look backward. You’re not examining what is currently occurring within your operation. Rather, you are analyzing what occurred previously, attempting to determine the reasons behind the occurrence, and documenting the results for finance, leadership, or possibly an auditor who has already identified discrepancies prior to your discovery.

As the former Fleet Manager for Manatee County, we spent considerable time and resources to reduce the amount of time from the completion of a transaction until we have visibility into that transaction. Our goal was not to identify misusers, although identifying misusers has numerous benefits, but to recognize the operational expense created by delayed data.

The cost of delayed data is far greater than just financial. It also creates strategic barriers. Each hour a fleet manager spends cleaning up creates an hour they could have spent on future-oriented work that truly enhances the performance of their operation. As cleaning up becomes the normative condition, future-oriented work is relegated to the “backburner.” Weeks turn into months, months turn into years, and the fleet remains at status quo.

The Unrecognized Labor Costs Nobody Quantifies
Consider the true cost of running manual exception reports. Somebody must pull the reports, sift through the transactions, determine which are valid, mark those that are invalid, route the invalids to the proper supervisors, wait for responses, reconcile the records and document the final result. For a fleet of any reasonable size, that is not a chore, that is a position.

Most organizations have never assigned a monetary value to this labor as it is dispersed throughout the time of several employees rather than having a designated budgetary item. However, the labor exists. If you were to calculate the total hours spent each week reviewing exceptions, routing the exceptions, receiving responses, reconciling records, and documenting the results, and if you multiplied those hours annually, you would likely find a sufficient quantity of hours to merit a serious discussion regarding a different approach to handling this issue.

When I speak with fleet managers at conferences and workshops, whether through NAFA, through the 100 Best Fleets program, or simply as peers, the managers who transitioned to using active fuel control systems are consistent in their reporting: they gain hours per week that formerly went to cleaning up to spend on the actual work of operating the fleet. This is not an incremental improvement. This is a paradigmatic shift in what the job entails.

Managing Fuel Expenditure vs. Explaining Expenditures
Here is the question I pose to fleet managers: Are you managing your fuel program, or are you explaining your fuel program? These are fundamentally different types of work that have fundamentally different implications for your organization.

Managing implies that you have timely access to information regarding your fuel expenditures, you have established controls that detect or prevent issues prior to them becoming part of the record, and you are spending your time making decisions rather than documenting issues. Explaining implies that you are reacting to issues that have been raised by finance, leadership or an auditor. The audit has identified some irregularity; you need to reconstruct the events surrounding the irregularity and defend your operation based upon the evidence.

Many public sector fleet professionals are highly skilled, knowledgeable, and experienced people who continue to operate in explanation mode not due to lack of knowledge, but because the systems available to them do not afford them the first option of management. Delayed access to data is not a policy failing. It is a systems failing that can be corrected. Professionals such as the individuals working in fleet management deserve systems that align with their level of capability.

The Strategic Difference That Counts
In terms of fuel management, the fleets that I have observed operating at the highest level, those continuously recognized as among the 100 Best Fleets, those with clean audits and a high degree of credibility with finance, all have one characteristic in common: they do not manage the past. They manage the present.

This is not coincidental. It is a deliberate design choice. They invested in systems that provided them with timely access to data, they developed processes that utilized that data, and they freed their personnel to manage the fleet rather than explain how the fleet managed itself. The decision to invest in these systems was not made lightly in many cases. Budget cycles, procurement procedures, and competing priorities are real obstacles in public sector fleet organizations. However, the fleets that successfully navigated these obstacles reported that the investments were successful.

Each public sector fleet organization has the ability to make this transition. The question is whether leadership acknowledges the cost of not making the transition. In my experience, once the costs of not transitioning to a proactive fuel management system are clearly quantified and communicated in a truthful manner, the discussion regarding the cost of investing in a better system becomes much more manageable.