New Ways To Fuel
Mobile fueling has gone digital and national.
JOHN BENDEL
TECHNOLOGY EDITOR
Mobile fleet fueling has gone national. And handheld. And wireless. Companies like Federal Express, Yellow Freight and Averitt Express now have fuel delivered to individual trucks at terminals across the country and they get one bill for the service from U.S. Fleet Services of Horsham, Pa.
But U.S. Fleet Services provides more than fuel. The company developed its very own private-fleet delivery technology almost from the ground up and provides a wealth of value-added data at no added cost. The system, called FleetTrak, works its magic over the Internet, extranets (private networks that use Internet protocols) and wireless communications on a number of levels.
Saul Cohen, U.S. Fleet Services vice president of information technology, said the goal from the beginning was to let drivers delivering fuel use handheld computers to capture each individual transaction, wirelessly.
Cohen's enthusiasm for wireless technology is obvious at the company's administrative offices in Bordentown, N.J., where many devices, including Cohen's presentation projector, are linked without wires.
A National Idea
According to Cohen, U.S. Fleet Services was created in 1997 by CEO Barry Gosin, whose father owned a local fuel oil business.
"The idea was to buy up local and regional fueling companies and make a national business," said Cohen.
The company does not inventory fuel. Fueling trucks load at the racks of contracted oil companies and deliver the fuel to individual trucks at customer sites during specified hours. Customers are billed at intervals of their choice, sometimes daily. Some are billed through the Comdata Corp.
The first year, U.S. Fleet Services did $50 million in business from 20 branch offices. Today the company has 50 locations doing $150 million annually.
FleetTrak lies at the heart of U.S. Fleet Services, providing both the accounting backbone of the company, extensive data services for customers and some slick wireless technology that makes company drivers more efficient.
FleetTrak development began with eEnterprise software from Great Plains Software, Inc. In fact, the back office system U.S. Fleet Services built earned an award from Great Plains, a division of Microsoft. According to Cohen, FleetTrak was built out from there with incremental enhancements, including a Web interface. The last major enhancement was those driver handhelds.
"We really struggled with it for a year or two, trying to find the right hardware, the right platform," said Cohen.
The right platform turned out to be Microsoft's Pocket PC, the Windows-style operating system for handheld devices. The handheld of choice was Intermec's 700, with built-in bar code scanner and touch screen (see sidebar). Currently, 150 of 200 U.S. Fleet Services drivers are equipped with Intermec 700 handhelds that communicate wirelessly. Here's what they do for U.S. Fleet:
Before a driver leaves to pick up fuel and make deliveries, he "synchs" his handheld with the company's network using the 802.11b wireless standard (see sidebar), an increasingly popular means of communicating within distances of 300 feet or so, although much longer ranges are possible.
A wide area network links U.S. Fleet Service's office locations with headquarters and with each other. The 700 handheld taps into that network wirelessly and downloads the data needed for that day's work, including the stops the driver is required to make. Of course, much mobile refueling actually takes place at night when trucks are in their terminals.
Cohen explained that U.S. Fleet Services divides the U.S. into regions. Drivers download not just their own stops, but all the stops in a region. That way, he said, routes can be changed on the fly.
"There are times when, say, the Phoenix branch might need to pick up a stop from the Tucson branch. Any driver can pick up anybody else's stop at any point during the night," Cohen said.
At a customer yard, the U.S. Fleet Services driver uses his 700 handheld to scan the barcode attached to each customer truck. This correctly identifies the vehicle. He pumps fuel, which is measured by onboard meters. That data transfers to the driver's handheld. All the data for each truck fueled at each stop is maintained in memory on a 128 mb CompactFlash card in the handheld.
"Even if you drop it (the Intermec 700) and break it, the data is still stored on the card. Even if you run over it the possibility of losing data is less than .001 percent," said Cohen.
Data Shared
On return to base, the driver synchs his handheld once again, this time wirelessly uploading the data gathered during his run into the wide- area network and the FleetTrak system.
The stream of data is then processed according to individual customer needs. Much of it is made available to customers at levels of detail, which vary by customer.
Cohen displayed a typical screen that can be accessed by customers over an extranet. It showed all the customer locations served by U.S. Fleet Services with a snapshot of fueling activity at the time.
"I can see all the pertinent data on an account. We also send direct, scheduled reports to specific customers, FedEx, for example," he said.
According to Cohen, there are up to 400 registered authorized users on the U.S. Fleet Services extranet. Regional and local fueling accounts have access to the same levels of data as big accounts, he said.
Most of that data is gathered by powerful handheld computers in the field, but Cohen is still not entirely satisfied.
"It's hard to believe," he said. "We've got drivers out there who have 200MHz, 64mb RAM computers in their hands — and we want more." n
Sidebars
802.11b: You Can Call If Wi-Fi
Intermecs' 700 Series
