A large customer recently shared some statistics with me the other day. They estimate that in July, they consumed roughly 20,000 fewer gallons of fuel than they did 2 months prior.
What changed? In mid-June, they asked us to start notifying them (programmatically) whenever a vehicle idled for longer than 7 minutes.
Once they got that notice, they would turn it into an email to the driver and the driver’s supervisor, and have it sent to them via blackberry.
INSTANTLY, the unnecessary idling stopped.
Here is a graph of the dramatic reduction. Bear in mind that in this industry and market, 25% idling is considered normal (stop lights, traffic, powering the lift gate, etc.) — that equates to roughly a 90% decrease in UNNECESSARY idling:
In June, this translated to roughly 10,000 fewer gallons of fuel (mostly diesel). In July, the first “full month” it was more like 20,000 when the final fuel bills were in. We helped this customer ensure their numbers were correct this using our fuel consumption report as well. Believe it or not, this is less than a gallon of fuel savings per day on average, per vehicle, but it has a massive effect on bottom line.
The rough cost savings for this fleet is over 3 times the cost of GPS Insight’s monthly service fee.
Bear in mind that this is still unfortunately a small decrease relative to the total fuel bill, but an interesting thing became clear after the drivers started shutting their vehicle down rather than leave them run, especially in the hotter markets:
The drivers got faster doing their deliveries, which meant the company got more efficient.
Without a nice cool cab to get back into, they took less time doing deliveries, since every minute they took to get the truck back up and rolling, the cab got hotter in the sun, especially on hot days. Our customer’s management commented to GPS Insight that they got more deliveries done on account of this change, as well as saving a considerable amount of money on fuel.We will introduce this capability for all of our customers in August, since the improvement was so significant, and we want everyone to be able to send both their driver and their supervisors proactive alerts/messages when excessive idling, speeding, off-hours usage, and out-of-geofence activity is detected.
Look for news about this new feature in our upcoming newsletter.
Thanks,
Rob.
The drivers got faster doing their deliveries, which meant the company got more efficient.
February 22nd, 2009 11:46 am
[...] a previous blog article, we showed a large customer’s cost savings after emailing their drivers any time they idled [...]
July 1st, 2009 9:43 am
[...] Here is an article about how we saved a customer $100,000 EACH MONTH in fuel during the Summer when fuel prices were at $5 per gallon of diesel. Then the snowball effect saved them literally millions throughout the year. [...]