The Daily Challenges of a Fuel Distribution Manager  

Working in fuel distribution is a tough job. There are always challenges to overcome and just when you think you have solved one, another one pops up. Your goal is a smooth, efficient, cost effective and reliable fuel distribution process. Unfortunately, the world often seems to have other plans.   This blog looks at some of the major challenges that you are likely to face and considers some of the ways that you might be able to solve them.  

Journey Planning  

A daily challenge when it comes to fuel distribution is journey planning. How can you create the most efficient delivery routes to minimise travel time for your drivers and therefore make those deliveries more efficient? And how do you make sure that outside factors such as traffic congestion and driver breaks are taken into consideration?   This is an ever-changing issue that is affected by the ever-changing nature of road conditions, customer requests and updates and the requirements of drivers. But it’s crucial to get it right to keep your business running smoothly.  

Fleet Management  

Your fleet is vital to your business and therefore must be maintained to ensure that the vehicles are operational, efficient, and available when needed. You have to schedule regular maintenance to prevent breakdowns, manage fleet repairs, minimise downtime and make sure all vehicles comply with safety regulations. But most importantly, you have to guarantee that vehicles are there, ready and prepared each day for the drivers to make their deliveries.  

Customer Service  

Often the making or breaking of a business, maintaining customer satisfaction is crucial. Consistently delivering efficiently and on time will maintain customer satisfaction, but there is more that can be done to wow and delight them.   Informing them as the delivery is near, giving them time to prepare for your driver’s arrival and making the whole delivery process more efficient is one way. But also, being able to quickly and easily reschedule a delivery if, for any reason, it was not possible when planned, or even schedule an additional delivery are key. While all customers want to know that you are managing the backend of the process well. They want to be invoiced accurately and on time and to know that you are maintaining records and compliance.  

Cost Management and Cashflow  

Ultimately all of the challenges you face are there because the business needs to run as well and efficiently as possible. A key element to running a successful business is to keep costs low and ensure good cashflow. Maintaining both of those is a regular challenge. Monitoring expenses and operational costs is key, as is making sure that money is coming into the business in a timely fashion.  

Paper-based Systems  

For some, one of the key challenges is managing old and out-of-date systems. If you have a paper-based system then it is certainly out-of-date, not efficient and increases the daily challenges that you face. Paper-based systems means that pieces of paper can get lost, but even if they make it back to the office you have to wait until they are back to process them. Often this is the next day and sometimes it is the next week. This automatically puts a delay into the system – whether that is a delay before you can invoice, which reduces cashflow, or a delay to process a follow-up order.  

Tools to Help Address Your Challenges  

If you are a Fuel Distribution Manager, struggling with any of the challenges listed above, then you will be excited to learn that there are tools that can help you, tools that can make your life easier and tools that can help you and your business to be more efficient.  

Mapping Console  

Mapping Consoles help you with journey planning and customer service as they can more effectively plan the driver’s route and provide enhanced data both to the driver and back to the office. Real-time data of the position of vehicles and the LOB (Load on Board) status can ensure that any customer concerns can be dealt with quickly and accurately, while the planning office can identify operational bottlenecks in real-time and to plan re-routes accordingly, without the need to reference other back-end software.  

The Fuelstar Mapping Console can provide you with a full historical audit trail of any deliveries and journeys. The data you can access includes:

●       Driver Login

●       Trip Start

●       Loading Location & Per-Compartment Load Quantities

●       Delivery Location, Discharge Quantities and Compartment Offload figures

●       Trip End

●       Driver Log-Off  

On top of that, specific filters can be applied to assist with easy and logical interpretation of the data. For example:

●       sorting of vehicles by Current Total LOB, or last seen

●       excluding of vehicles with devices “logged off”

●       identification of vehicles closest to a particular Address/Postcode/Town/POI  

Geo Fencing  

Another great tool that you can deploy to improve the delivery process and increase customer satisfaction is geo fencing. This involves using GPS technology to set virtual boundaries and enable systems to react to vehicles as they enter or leave the defined area. For example a boundary can be created around a specified delivery destination. Once your driver enters that zone, you can be confident that they are only a few minutes away from the customer. Many of the geo fencing systems, FuelStar’s included, can be configured so that an SMS can be sent automatically to the customer, giving notification that their delivery is on its way.  

The ability to track your deliveries in and out of defined areas means that you can have a transparent view of your drivers and deliveries. This not only helps you with journey planning and understanding where drivers are, but it can also help to set and meet customer expectations.  

A geo fencing tool can also help to reduce the time that drivers need to complete their deliveries, saving your business time and potentially increasing the number of deliveries that can be completed in a day. By alerting the customer that your driver is near, any preparation for the receipt of delivery can be made and the time from arrival to commencing the pump-off is greatly reduced.  

Job Planning  

Another tool that can be deployed to help Fuel Distribution Managers with their daily challenges, especially journey planning is a job planning function. The best job planning tools allow you to drag and drop jobs onto the relevant vehicles and create a manifest. Then, with a link to the mapping console, it can be sent out directly to the driver, with updated routes and jobs displayed in real time.  

Using a tool like this can help to save fuel and reduce the driver’s time on the road, both of which can provide a direct benefit to the bottom line.  

Order Entry and Reconciliation  

We’ve considered the tools that can assist Fuel Distribution Managers with the challenges they face at the front end of the business - managing the deliveries, the drivers and most importantly ensuring customer satisfaction. It is now time to look at what can be deployed to address the back-office challenges and improve costs and cashflow and in particular, move away from paper-based systems.  

The most important tool to assist with this would be a dedicated proof of delivery tool that offers a web based back office system that is also linked to the job planning and mapping tools described above.  

TouchStar’s FuelStar solution is the perfect solution and can work for Fuel Distribution Managers in almost any fuel delivery business:

●       Heating Oil Distribution

●       Retail Bulk Fuel Delivery

●       LPG Bulk Distribution

●       Gas Cylinder Distribution

●       Aircraft Re-fuelling  

Using the web-based system the Fuel Distribution Manager can enter jobs onto the system where, thanks to the integration with the planning tool, they can be automatically allocated to vehicles in the most logical order.  

A dedicated system such as this has multiple features that can make your deliveries smoother, with one being digital signatures from the customer. Once delivery has been completed, the customer can view full details immediately and can sign digitally. They can even make payment at this point if required.  

However, if payment is not collected at the point of delivery, then the FuelStar solution continually transfers all updates and details to the back office. End of shift reconciliations and even client invoicing can be handled automatically by the system, reducing the time taken to process the paperwork and improving cashflow.  

To find out more about FuelStar and how it can help Fuel Distribution Managers with their daily challenges, get in touch via our contact page.