Today we are in the era of digital transformation, modern economies are relying heavily on technology to drive down costs and to extend the reach of their products in the marketplace, digital transformation has become a common strategy across the industry sectors.

In the area of commercial transport and logistics, diesel fuel happens to be the main consumable, proper management of diesel fuel usage creates the difference between success and failure for the operators and players in this sector. Diesel fuel is an operational expense that presents the best opportunity for the dishonest employees to reap where they did not sow. It is therefore imperative for the commercial transport and logistics players to embrace digital transformation with a particular focus on diesel fuel monitoring systems.   

Innovators aware of this need within the commercial transport and logistics sector have been working day and night to bring forth solutions that can be of help to the players, several forms of diesel fuel monitoring systems and solutions have therefore emerged.

Some are traditional in nature while others are based on the latest advances in computing and communication technologies, the pen and the paper coupled with an excel sheet and hundreds of  phone calls to drivers characterizes the traditional approach to diesel fuel monitoring system, the persistent fleet managers somehow manages to keep costs down albeit with endless human resource challenges arising from frequent quarrels with drivers, but still some blind spots are impossible to eliminate considering that the source of truth is the driver himself without any other mechanism of counter checking.

For example if a fleet manager instructs his driver to put one hundred litres of fuel at the fuelling station, the driver may decide to put ninety litres instead and pocket the difference, for a vehicle that makes numerous trips in unusual traffic it will be near impossible for the fleet manager or the vehicle owner to detect that something wrong happened, furthermore, the only option for the fleet manager is to trust that the driver fueled the vehicle as instructed. It is only at the end of trips that the fleet manager will realize that the profit returned vis a vis the trips made do not add up. This is a common challenge to most commercial transport and logistics players.

New approaches to diesel fuel monitoring have therefore come to the aid of the fleet manager or the vehicle owner, besides the usual odometer logs carried out by the fleet manager to help develop a rough estimate of required or consumed fuel quantity for accomplishing a certain cargo delivery, a technology enabled third eye is receiving widespread adoption across the transport and logistics sector, this are the internet of things (IoT) based diesel fuel monitoring systems.

In this approach sensors equipped with telecommunications network capabilities are fitted into the commercial vehicles, these devices acquire fuel data from the fuel tanks and relay this information to computer application servers for analysis and onward presentation to the fleet manager in a format that he or he understands, mostly the information coming from these diesel fuel monitoring systems is in the form of fleet reports and instant messages to mobile phones,  for example, the information could include the real-time location of the commercial vehicle at all times, a function that is realized through GPS tracking. In addition we may have the amount of fuel filled in litres for every fueling of the vehicle. Then as the commercial vehicle makes its trips, a relationship between distance moved with full movement trail of the vehicle and the amount of fuel being consumed in litres, this can further be represented graphically whereby distance and time appear on one axis while the fuel amount appear on the other axis. Lastly the ability to get instant alarms and alerts for events that are out of the ordinary, a good example is fuel siphoning whereby the event is communicated to the relevant person on the spot, in addition event related to fuel fills are communicated to the fleet manager instantly to be able to know where the vehicle was fueled and how much fuel was put. Professional diesel fuel monitoring systems provide all these functionalities thus empowering the fleet manager to have full control of fuel related costs and vehicle trips.

Smart Embedded Systems diesel fuel monitoring system is one such solution that has enabled thousands of vehicle owners reduce their operational expenses drastically, starting right from the day the installation is done. First and foremost the quality of the technology is unrivalled as it is based on robust machine to machine (m2m) platform with telecom class reliability. Secondly the accuracy of the solution is perfect and up-to the milliliters level, as a result of the advanced fuel data acquisition technique adopted. In practical sense it means that the possibility of fuel theft during fuel fills or via siphoning is eliminated completely. Thirdly is the ability afforded by the diesel fuel monitoring system whereby every relevant information is communicated in real-time to the vehicle owner as a matter of priority for corrective action to be taken.

In other instances, cases of fuel tank overfilling has created opportunities for rogue drivers to steal from the vehicle owners, this theft is premised on the fact that for every trip the fleet manager or vehicle owners have been conditioned to buy new fuel without consideration to the fuel that remained after the previous trips, in any case this information is invisible to them, diesel fuel monitoring systems eliminates this opaqueness, the fulltime visibility of the fuel tank volume has enabled fleet managers not to fall into the trick of drivers but buy fuel only when necessary, the ability to always know fuel level in the tank at all times is a game changer, therefore, contributing to overall saving for the transport and logistics business.

Several attempts to steal from the vehicle owners have been thwarted through some of these features, Looking at our case studies reveals that several customers reports a reduction of up to forty percent of their expenses by adopting Smart Embedded Systems diesel fuel monitoring system.