Key Steps to Sustainable Fleet Planning

Initiatives to reduce the negative environmental impacts of fleet vehicles have taken global precedence in recent years. Well-balanced sustainable fleet planning and operations is crucial to reducing carbon emissions while preserving efficiency and managing expenses.

However, not all fleet management teams in charge of enhancing productivity understand or can identify which actions will most strengthen their sustainability efforts and improve fuel efficiency. This article will discuss five key steps and explain why they are critical to promoting fleet sustainability.

Why is Fleet Sustainability Important?

Fleet sustainability is an initiative that benefits society worldwide through efforts to reduce the environmental, economic, and social effects of fleet vehicles. Some of these efforts include (to be discussed in more detail below):

• Monitor driving behavior
• Fuel efficiency training & coaching
• Identify and eliminate fuel theft
• Fleet optimization 
• CO2 emissions tracking and reduction

Sustainable Fleet Planning: 5 Essential Steps

Your fleet management team should consider the following five steps while designing or updating a sustainable fleet plan:

1. Monitor Driving Behavior

Rapid acceleration, speeding, and hard braking are three crucial indications of aggressive driving. These aggressive driving behaviors can considerably reduce fuel efficiency. Performance improvements in each of these areas can result in up to a 20% increase in fuel savings.

Tourmo's AI-powered platform makes it easy to identify aggressive driving across all drivers, resulting in a dramatic reduction in rapid acceleration, speeding, and hard braking events.

Tourmo’s driver behavior workflows will notify drivers of aggressive driving events and provide:

• Automated driver feedback
• Individualized driver risk assessment
• In-Cab driver audio notifications

It’s important to note that identifying driving behaviors that impact fuel efficiency is only one part of the solution. Fuel economy optimization pertaining to driver behavior will require discussing with drivers their aggressive driving behavior and encouraging them to improve their overall performance.

2. Fuel Efficiency Training & Coaching

Traditional driving improvement programs for large fleets are typically time-consuming and leave only a fraction of safety events addressed in training. However, coaching drivers on fuel-efficient driving behavior can significantly improve your fleet’s eco-performance. 

Companies can use fleet management software like Tourmo to provide automated coaching information and recommend in-person coaching when necessary to review recent driver performance. These ongoing automated training efforts will:

• Reduce excessive idling, rapid acceleration, speeding, and hard braking events
• Review driver behavior ranked by driver eco-performance
• Review over/under fuel spend for groups
• Control vehicle performance

Fleet management should provide coaching opportunities based on performance within a driver’s control. Drivers should not be penalized for behaviors outside their control, like weather, traffic, or topography, that can lead to less efficiency. 

Tourmo's patented contextualized driver scoring model and program supports more extensive training efforts. 

Our software can produce highly accurate driving analysis that identifies differences between a truck traveling long distances on a flat plain, which will use less fuel, and a truck traveling the same distance in a mountainous or urban area, which will use more fuel. 

3. Identify and Eliminate Fuel Theft

Monitoring for signs of fuel fraud and reducing fuel spend will play a critical role in any sustainability fleet management plan. Fuel theft can be identified and quickly eliminated using an effective, sustainable fleet planning solution.

Tourmo’s AI-powered platform combines fuel transaction information and vehicle location data, enabling users to monitor suspicious fuel usage in real-time, with confidence levels, and reduce reliance on manual efforts to reconcile fuel transaction data.  

The benefits of Tourmo’s fuel theft solution include the following:

• Enable drivers to reconcile fuel transactions automatically
• Provide sophisticated fuel theft detection
• Monitor and report suspicious fuel transactions or use
• Detect and report sudden drops in fuel levels
• Reduced environmental impact

Tourmo’s fleet management software can accurately identify and eliminate ongoing fuel theft and fraud with reliable data that reduces false positives. It will improve overall confidence levels in findings and allow your workforce to take action when critical events occur. 

4. Fleet Optimization

Management can reduce vehicle usage and increase fleet output with fleet optimization.

The first step of fleet optimization requires visibility into the performance of the fleet, which will enable management to spot underperforming or redundant vehicles and provide the highest return on investment in terms of costs and environmental effects.

Companies might consider a granular recording of vehicle data to establish the fleet size, that includes:

• Driver-to-vehicle ratio
• Route to vehicle ratio
• Vehicle mileage to identify underutilized and unnecessary vehicles
• Revenue to Vehicle Benchmarking and comparison
• Vehicle downtime

5. CO2 Tracking and Reduction

The Clean Trucks Plan, a proposed series of regulations, saw the release of its first phase by the EPA on March 7, 2022. Starting with the model year 2027, new regulations will promote clean air and lessen pollution from all heavy-duty vehicles and engines.

Tourmo’s Fuel & CO2 solution will make it easy to automatically prepare regulatory reporting about your fleet’s carbon footprint as stricter CO2 regulations continue to increase on both the state and federal levels, with:

• GHG protocol-compliant reporting
• On-demand and scheduled reporting

Greenhouse gas reporting will help companies determine whether they’re meeting compliance standards and whether their current sustainable fleet planning strategies are meeting larger sustainability goals.

Partner with Tourmo — Solutions for Sustainable Fleet Planning

Companies can choose from several sustainable fleet planning strategies. However, working with the appropriate fleet management system provider will play a crucial role in maximizing the effectiveness of that plan.

While telematics data is a key component of many solutions, even without access to hard-wired telematics in your fleet, we can help. Tourmo is an experienced, knowledgeable partner who can tailor solutions that work with existing investments to achieve your unique business goals.