Fuel Management
How a fleet buys, dispenses, controls and accounts for fuel. Usually the second largest operating cost and the one most exposed to loss.
Fuel management covers the whole chain: buying it, storing it, dispensing it, attributing it to the right vehicle and department, and noticing when the numbers stop making sense.
Control is the point, not price. A fleet that cannot tie a transaction to a specific vehicle and a specific odometer reading cannot detect the ordinary failure modes, which are rarely dramatic: fuel drawn for a personal vehicle, a card used after an employee leaves, a fuel type dispensed into the wrong equipment, a site meter drifting out of calibration. Each is small and each is persistent.
Public fleets typically run some mix of bulk on-site tanks and commercial cards, and the mix is a real decision. On-site storage buys control and resilience and brings regulatory obligation with it: tank compliance, spill planning, inspection and reporting. Cards move that burden to a vendor and hand back less control over where and when fueling happens.
Resilience matters separately because it is a public-sector requirement rather than a preference. A fleet that must operate through a storm or an outage needs fuel it can dispense when commercial stations cannot, which is an argument for on-site capacity that has nothing to do with cost per gallon.
