Trucking Industry News

Burlington, N.J. - Arsenault Associates has launched a major fuel efficiency initiative for its flagship Dossier fleet maintenance management software solutions with a goal of achieving an average fuel cost reduction of 10% for fleet customers.

According to CEO Charles Arsenault, "Fuel costs are out of hand and it's dramatically affecting our customers' bottom lines. As a leader in the fleet software industry we have an obligation to help our Dossier customers respond to economic conditions. To accomplish this, we have realigned our development priorities to concentrate on reducing fleet fuel consumption. We are bringing the full weight of our 30 years' experience in fleet maintenance software technology to bear on this important topic. We will focus on the three items with the greatest influence on fuel economy: drivers, tire pressure and vehicle operations. Our target is to increase our customer's mpg by a minimum of .5 mpg with an overall fuel cost reduction goal of 10%."

Arsenault continued, "While .5 mpg may not sound like much, consider that a fleet of 50 tractors averaging 100,000 miles per year per unit that averages 6 mpg, has a fuel burn rate of 833,000 gallons. At $5 per gallon that's $4,166,500. Using Dossier's new fuel initiative should yield a minimum of .5 mpg increase, reducing our example fleet's fuel consumption by 64,000 gallons - equating to a savings of $320,347 or a whopping 7.6% cost reduction by itself," he said.

Drivers have the greatest affect on fuel consumption. Addressing drivers who operate equipment in a less than an efficient manner is fundamental. Dossier will provide automated operational efficiency comparisons that will rank drivers by efficiencies and variations to equipment norms. This will help fleet managers easily identify problem drivers and quickly raise the fleet's mpg mean average.

Using automation to address tires with chronic low pressure is an important part of achieving significant fuel savings. "Tire pressure has always had a significant impact on fuel performance. Today's high fuel prices make chronic low tire pressure a critical and costly issue quite aside from the ever-rising cost of the tire itself," he said.

According to Arsenault, commercial vehicles with tires under-inflated by a factor of as little as 15% will raise fuel consumption by 2.5%. Keeping tires properly inflated and knowing which ones have chronic air pressure issues will save our example fleet of 50 tractors $104,165 annually. The new Dossier Tire Management system completed beta testing with great success and is now fully released and available.

Bob Hausler, Arsenault Associates vice-president of marketing and technology, commented on the urgency as follows, "We are in the middle of a release development cycle, but this issue is so important that it
dictates a mid-course correction for us. Much of the information needed is already in Dossier, but needs to be better exposed so it can be leveraged. Our development team will combine fuel consumption and
cost data with driver, vehicle and tire data to create a new fuel management system that automatically identifies and alerts the fleet manager of poor performing drivers and equipment. It will include automated exception notices, consumption and cost trend analysis, and comparative reporting that highlights items and issues negatively affecting fuel economy. Most importantly, these enhancements will be made quickly and are expected to be delivered to Dossier users in less than 12 weeks."

CEO Arsenault summed up, "We are taking a holistic approach in this fuel saving initiative by enhancing and consolidating the automated management tools that address driver, vehicle and tires and give them desktop priority. In fact, the Dossier fuel efficiency initiative is already underway. Well-run fleets already collect the data needed to track driver and vehicle performance," he said. "Our focus now is to make the most of this data and present it in an effective, timely context that shows management what steps are needed to keep fuel use to a minimum. We expect the result for many fleets will be a fuel efficiency improvement of 10% or more."

About Arsenault Associates

Arsenault supports green, fuel-efficient fleets and equipment. Its Dossier software serves a growing customer base of more than 3,500 fleets that operate over 500,000 pieces of equipment. Customers include large Fortune 100 corporate fleets, as well as mid and small size fleets in a wide variety of industries like trucking, concrete, construction, food, beverage, education, marine, government agencies and more. Dossier manages a variety of vehicles including tractors, trailers, trucks, buses and autos, plus construction and material handling equipment. Arsenault has provided maintenance management expertise to fleets of all sizes since 1979. For more information, visit www.arsenault.biz.