In years past, we didn’t really have the proper mechanisms in place to dictate where our drivers refueled. We’ve ended up stepping away from a fuel system where we would hand the driver a fuel stop. We would negotiate month end and month out fuel prices with different fuel stops and at that time we’d have to change the publication for each driver that walked through the door. What we determined was that we needed the control of a fuel optimizer program that worked in part with a satellite system.

When the driver is empty or starting fresh off of just coming off own time, our fleet managers determine what the driver’s fuel level is, and at that time, a fuel route is created. What that does is populate the fuel stops on the driver’s satellite screen with the stops he needs to hit. And it does that by picking out the cheapest locations along his route allowing us to buy fuel at the most optimum level.

In order for us to get the days fuel routes, every morning we get a download from OPUS. OPUS is a calculated fuel pricing network that includes most fuel stops across the nation. The program takes this download and, using the raw fuel price, calculates the most cost effective fuelling stops along the driver’s route.

We have had this system in place for going on four years. It’s been pretty effective for us and we’ve really worked aggressively at implementing it and holding our drivers and fleet managers accountable for making sure that we get the results we should. We have a compliance setup that tells us what the compliance rate is and which of our drivers are complying. When we first started, we kicked it off at about 55% compliance. Today, we’re averaging anywhere from 93% to 96% compliance fleet-wide. So we’ve driven the efficiencies about as tight as we can, with 3% room for error.

Trying to monitor and measure the savings is tough to pinpoint. But historically, we’ve seen savings of anywhere from .10 to .18 cents per gallon. In our case, you’re looking at 225 trucks and anywhere from 13,000 – 18,000 gallons per day, so the savings are real big and they do have a tremendous impact on the bottom line.