For Justin Mullins, budgeting for fuel “is almost more of an art than science.” 

Mullins is the fleet manager for Sarasota County Florida Fleet Services, which uses reports from the Energy Information Administration, or EIA, to help predict fuel prices. Mullins says his department uses EIA’s information for budgeting purposes.

“Also, just historically, you can look back and see the trends,” said Mullins, who oversees about 1,600 assets of a diverse fleet for the department, including lawnmowers and heavy construction equipment in addition to pickup trucks, vans, and cars. “You also capture the information internally because when we get a load, the price changes in our system.”

Mullins said fleets budget for fuel pricing in different ways, noting that some of them put in a buffer for unexpected circumstances such as domestic and world events. Fleets do that with the quantity of fuel or the price, he said.

“If you’re predicting how much fuel you're going to use, and you’re predicting what the average price is going to be doing during that budget cycle, you can push one or both of those numbers higher to try to cover any unforeseen spikes in fuel prices as long as your upper management and fiscal department in the municipality will let you do that,” he said.

Because of that and other issues, putting together a fuel budget can be complicated, and again, more like an art, Mullins said. 

“Nobody has a crystal ball,” he said. “If I could predict the fuel prices next year, I'd probably be working somewhere making much more money. You have the best and brightest investors and minds trying to do this stuff, and they can't do it, so it's very tough for municipalities to do it and not have some speed bumps or hurdles along the way.”

Managing and Maintaining Fuel Sites

But predicting and managing fuel prices is just one aspect of fuel management. Sarasota County Fleet Services operates four fuel sites, with one full-time employee managing them, ordering fuel, and maintaining them. The county uses AssetWorks FuelFocus, an automated fuel management system.

Managing drivers’ use of fuel is another aspect of fuel management, and Sarasota County Fleet Services uses fuel rings that monitor the type of fuel a vehicle can use and how much.

The county also uses telematics on its vehicles and is looking at integrating its telematics system with the fuel system.

“The best way to monitor use is with something hard mounted to the vehicle that somebody can’t use to put fuel in something else,” Mullins said. “So you’re tracking exactly what fuel is going into that vehicle. However, we sometimes must use fobs, like for some of the mowing crews. They need gas cans to fill up lawn mowers or hand-held equipment, so they have fuel fobs. The fobs help us control the amount and type of fuel users 

get and the number of permitted daily transactions.”

Mullins continued, “We can set those parameters in the system and regulate what’s going on with those fuel sites. We’re constantly looking to improve the operation and see if there are new and better ways to monitor fuel use. We want to make it easy for the end user and have very few technical issues, but we also want to gain more visibility and control over those fuel transactions, so we can be certain that fuel is not being misused.”

How Technology Plays a Key Role

The city of Dublin, Ohio fleet management department is also all-in on the use of technology to manage its fuel program. The city currently uses verion 4 of the EJ Ward fuel management platform, which Dublin integrated with its fleet’s FASTER web fleet management software. Fuel quantity dispensed and current mileage for any city-owned vehicle are automatically downloaded into the FASTER software. 

That allows the department to track vehicle miles per gallon if needed and stay ahead of preventive maintenance by running a past due report weekly, said the city’s fleet manager, John K. Hyatt. He manages 262 vehicles and 173 pieces of equipment for the city.

Also in the tech area, the department is currently installing Samsara GPS into all of its city- owned vehicles. Hyatt said that system will help the city route equipment such as snow plows and tree chipper services to become better managed and efficient through better tracking of all city assets.

He explained that an EJ Ward tool called a CANceiver is mounted underneath the dash. It hooks up to the vehicle’s on-board unit.

“If it doesn’t have a CANceiver on that truck, they’re not getting fuel,” Hyatt said. “So you have no fuel theft.”

When drivers get fuel, information from the transaction is transmitted to the FASTER system. All of this technology has been a big step up for the city, he said.

“The olden days when I came here to fleet, we used index cards,” he said.

A vehicle in those days might end up thousands of miles past due for service because the city did not know exactly how many miles on were on the vehicles.

“But now, it’s just as simple as running a report, and you know what’s due for service,” he said. “It’s almost like a fleet manager’s dream.”

The tanks go through a monthly inspection program called BUSTR through the Ohio Department of Commerce.

“You open up the fuel fill cover and check to see if water has infiltrated into this area, and if so, remove it so it can't contaminate the fuel.” Hyatt said, adding that the city uses a system called Veeder-Root that inspects the tanks and checks for leaks. “A couple times a week you’ll go over to your Veeder-Root system make sure everything’s fine,” he said. “If not, you’ll hear the alarm going off and you’ll know something is wrong.”

So it seems the fleet department is all-in on technology for fuel management?

“Very much so, Hyatt said. “Theft is nonexistent.” The city has used the EJ Ward and Veeder-Root systems for about 14 years apiece, and things are much better than in the beginning when drivers would fill their own gas cans without a way for the fleet department to track anything.

Driver Behavior and Fuel Management

Monitoring drivers is an important part of fuel management for the city of Dublin, and the fleet department recently moved from Verizon Network Fleet to Samsara. The Samsara GPS program monitors driver behavior such as hard stops and quick acceleration that have an impact on the amount of fuel used.

Hyatt said the Samsara program is helpful in route planning for snow plows and other equipment.

“You get some kid out there pounding the gas, we’ll know it,” he said. “We normally just contact their supervisor: ‘There was ten of these events that happened this day. Take care of it,’”

The city’s hybrid and CNG vehicles also play a factor in the fuel management program. 

Hyatt said the 3.3L hybrid engine on Ford Interceptor police vehicles running 24 hours per day, seven days per week with eight-hour shifts daily uses an average of four gallons of fuel on every 8-hour shift. 

That compares to the department’s older 3.5L Ford Interceptor engines that on average use eight gallons of fuel for every eight-hour shift. A result is an average savings of $10,483 per vehicle per year. If a department only operates 20 Interceptors, the savings in fuel alone is notable, Hyatt said.

The city’s overall fleet is approximately 40% CNG, and the department also operates its own CNG station. Fuel equipment company, OWL, oversees that.

“You’ve got to have a good fleet management company that maintains and does all the repair work,” Hyatt said.

He and his department are not much into the business of forecasting fuel prices.

“[Predicting] current fuel prices is a crap-shoot,” Hyatt said. “If I had a crystal ball, life would be easy. Dublin’s fleet has a great relationship with our finance department, and if our fuel budget is getting low, they allow us to increase our fuel budget to cover any additional fuel expenses.”

But in the area of overall fuel management, Hyatt said that although it might not be the most exciting topic, technology makes the job easier.

“It’s kind of a boring world out there when it comes to fuel and fuel management,” he said. “It is in our case, anyway, because we’ve got so much technology on it, it makes my life so much easier.”