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Creating a Fuel Benchmark |
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Thursday, 08 July 2010 12:54 |
Some comparisons are easily made, others not so much. Let's say you want to compare the average fleet fuel efficiency of truckload freight carriers operating entirely within the American Southeast. There's consistent terrain, everybody is hauling 80,000 pounds gross, and with quality/comfort set aside, the five-axle tractor-trailer rigs are built to be quite competitive. Take the fleet's total annual mileage, divide it by the total annual gallons of fuel purchased and the resulting Miles Per Gallon (MPG) figure provides a reasonably accurate metric to compare your fleet operation practices against those of your competitors.
In the beverage business, it's not so simple. The equipment varies from light-duty vans, to box trucks, to 16-bay side-loaders, to 53-foot dry-van trailers, and more. The weather and terrain varies from Montreal to Miami, from Death Valley to Denver, to Dallas and D.C. Because not all miles or trucks are created equal, this rules out using fleet average MPG in a meaningful comparison between fleets. At first glance, an accountant might suggest using fuel expense as a percentage of sales revenue, but even if the equipment and routes are identical, it's impossible to compare the revenue of the fleet hauling 50 cents per liter of water against the fleet hauling $100 per liter of bourbon.
The answer is to create a benchmark self-assessment test that focuses not on trying to compare unequal miles or unequal equipment, but rather, to score the fleet's fuel efficiency strategy based on the breadth and depth of fuel saving opportunities employed by the fleet.
Due to the diversity of operations, equipment and environmental factors, it's unlikely that any one fleet can pursue all of the available opportunities to the same degree or with similar results, but many of the items are universally applicable, so the scoring is designed to measure the extent to which a fleet is pursuing the applicable fuel-saving opportunities.
Obviously, Beverage World would like to know how your fleet measures up, both today and in the future. Those fleets that consider their fuel efficiency strategy to be proprietary data not to be disclosed, can still benefit from taking the self-assessment test to internally measure year-over-year improvement in the execution of that strategy. Scores can be submitted to
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From Beverage World July, 15, 2010
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The largest independently owned juice company in the US, Apple & Eve continues to grow with its line of pure, natural juices in an increasingly health-minded beverage market.