Interested in Dispatch School? 3 Tips for Better Fuel Management When You Become a Fleet Manager

Becoming a fleet manager is one of the exciting career paths you can pursue after dispatch school. A fleet manager oversees a company’s fleet of vehicles and its drivers. Job duties can include purchasing new vehicles, maintaining driver and maintenance records, and hiring and training drivers. Because fleet managers need to ensure the company’s fleet is operating at maximum efficiency, fuel management is a top priority.

In fact, fuel is often one of the biggest expenses involved with running a fleet of vehicles. As a fleet manager, figuring out ways to maximize fuel efficiency can help you succeed in your career. Here are a few ways you can cut fuel costs as a fleet manager.

1. Fleet Managers Should Encourage Drivers to Obey Speed Limits

As a fleet manager, your drivers may feel pressured to get trips done as quickly as possible, which in turn can lead to them treating speed limits as suggestions rather than as rules. Your job as a fleet manager will include discouraging drivers from speeding, no matter how tight deadlines for trips and deliveries may seem.

Speeding is, of course, dangerous and it could result in your company being ticketed and building up a poor safety record. Furthermore, it is very bad on fuel. According to Natural Resources Canada, fuel efficiency drops off dramatically when vehicles are travelling above 80 km/h and a vehicle going 120 km/h uses 20% more fuel than a vehicle going 100 km/h. Getting your drivers to obey the speed limit will make a big difference in your fleet’s overall fuel costs.

Fuel efficiency drops off dramatically when drivers go above 80 km/h

2. Use Your Dispatch School Training to Plan Fuel Efficient Routes

Route planning is one of the main duties of both fleet managers and dispatchers. After dispatch school, you’ll likely become quite familiar with route planning. Being able to efficiently plan routes not only ensures trips are done on time, but that drivers are using fuel efficiently.

As a fleet manager you should try to make sure drivers are “packing” trips, meaning that they are doing multiple trips or deliveries together rather than wasting fuel through backtracking. If a driver has a delivery on the other end of the city, for example, you should plan a route that allows that driver to make other deliveries on the way there or back. Additionally, fleet managers should schedule driver trips that avoid rush hour and traffic, which can otherwise increase fuel consumption.

3. Grads of Dispatch School Know Safety Can Help Save on Gas

Learning about safety is another important part of dispatch courses and it can also make a significant difference to your fleet’s fuel efficiency.

Dangerous and harsh driving happens to be very bad on gas. For example, aggressive braking and accelerating—also called “jackrabbiting”—eats up fuel. Drivers should be encouraged to maintain a safe distance from other vehicles, to roll to a stop at red lights, and, like we mentioned already, to stay under the speed limit. All of these safe driving behaviours will cut down on aggressive driving which in turn will cut down on fuel consumption.