There is a cost to monitoring, but there is a higher cost for run-outs, long trips for small drops, and inefficiency in deliveries. Especially with the current industry state where driver shortage and rising fuel costs are a burning problem for fuel distributing companies.
Getting real-time visibility into what’s going on inside the tank, i.e., fuel level and access to data on exactly when, where, and how much to deliver to your customer’s tanks, is a big piece of modern fuel marketers’ strategy.
Why are tank monitors a hit solution?
- Eliminate run-outs
- Reduce delivery runs
- Improve fuel delivery efficiency
- Get rid of manual order creation and tracking
- Provide an exceptional customer experience
Eliminate run-outs
Tank monitoring systems help create orders automatically when tanks read a certain level by constantly monitoring the tank levels. The automated process completely eliminates run-outs.
You don’t want to risk keeping your customer’s tank empty, and tank monitor integration ensures that all keep-fill orders are fulfilled timely.
Reduce delivery runs
If you’re not monitoring your tanks, there’s a high chance your drivers are either making last-minute delivery runs to isolated locations or taking long trips for small deliveries. Either way, you’re losing at least thousands of dollars worth of fuel and operations costs.
With tank monitor integration, you can reduce up to 10% of driver hours and improve the fill rate.
Get rid of manual order creation and tracking
Tank Monitors help expand monitoring and automation capabilities. You literally have servers monitoring tank levels even while you’re asleep.
So four things happen here:
- You don’t need employees dedicated to manually monitor readings. So orders are error-proof. It’s difficult to forecast fuel levels when usage is inconsistent. Leave alone having someone monitoring it every second.
- Dispatchers don’t have to be burdened with dozens of emails and phone calls to create and assign tank-fill orders.
- Reconciliation becomes easy – Any variance in fuel ordered vs. delivered gets highlighted, and dispatchers can reconcile it before pushing it to accounting.
- You can predict consumption, and you can accordingly plan visits.
You can have tank monitors that would track tank levels and notify dispatchers when orders drop to a certain level. But if that’s all that tank monitors do – they’re no good.
It’s useful only when Tank Monitors integrate with the dispatch software and the orders are created and assigned automatically.
Provide exceptional customer service
With no run-outs and automatic order creations, customers are always fueled at the right time. Furthermore, with better order management, customers get faster deliveries. This adds to a great customer experience and retention.
In a nutshell, Tank Monitor Integration gives you access to precise data on when and where to deliver. That way – your drivers are making fewer stops while avoiding the unnecessary ones and getting more product delivered in lesser trips. This helps maximize fill rates.
When your trucks are driving fewer miles, it also means vehicles wear and tear less. So you don’t have to incur high maintenance costs.
The entire operations is much more cost-effective with tank monitors. Vehicle and labor are the highest (yet controllable) costs in operations. Using tank monitors, you’re saving precious dollars.
You’re able to better manage your fleet without having to add new trucks for emergency refills.
This helps your dispatch operations reach a much higher efficiency level and positively impacts the company’s bottom line.
How does FleetPanda’s tank monitoring system work?
It’s a 3-step simple process to integrate tank monitors into FleetPanda’s system:
- We write an interface with your tank monitor provider (like SmartLogiX, Anova) to set up your tank monitors on our system.
- Set up threshold levels (i.e., the fuel level in the customer’s tank) at which you want to prompt an order creation and the time you want the tank details to sync with our app.
- Integrate tank details for every customer that is accessible on the dispatch portal.
You have your orders ready to be dispatched.
P.S You have the flexibility to either create orders automatically (the system creates the order itself once the tank reaches the set threshold level), or you can manually create orders.
Why choose FleetPanda?
With FleetPanda’s system, you’re doing just more than monitoring customer tank levels. Our dispatch system integrates with tank monitors to pull out tank information in real-time. You’re managing the entire operations on a cloud system that empowers you to create orders, plan driver shifts, create recurring orders, track drivers in real-time, check inventory levels, reconcile shifts, and much more. So you have a truly unified operations system with dispatchers having absolute control and visibility into every order.
Your entire operations workflow, from order creation to dispatch to invoicing, is automated through a single cloud-based platform.