With pump prices hitting near-record levels, many fleet operators are being squeezed by the escalating costs. One national newspaper reported recently that a haulage fleet in Wales paid 20% of its annual £30m turnover in fuel duty and was turning away delivery work as it was no longer cost effective.

Faced with another potential 1p per litre increase in April, many fleet operators who are finding it increasingly difficult to make ends meet, are steeling themselves for another hike in fuel prices.

But says Paul Jackson, product development manager at Mycompanyfleet, the fleet arm of HR software giant NorthgateArinso, there is plenty of low-cost action that fleets can take that can help cut fuel bills by between 5 and 10%.

'The story of the Welsh fleet actively turning business away due to the high cost of fuel underlines the importance for fleet operators of being able to make informed decisions over the true cost of fuel and their actual spend.

'At Mycompanyfleet, we recognised very early in our development cycle that a powerful yet easy to use dashboard was key in helping our customers control fuel and other fleet operating costs.'

The dashboard offering within the Mycompanyfleet's FleetAcumen fleet management system allows users to set KPIs (key performance indicators) to measure important parameters such as pence per mile cost, miles per gallon, carbon emissions and league tables of worst and best performing drivers – all the business intelligence measurements a fleet manager would need to make informed decisions on managing fuel costs more effectively.

At the same time, key fuel data can be downloaded from fuel cards of virtually any description directly into the fleet management system, allowing information to be fed back to the fleet manager via management reports, including location of cheapest fuel, and exceptions by cost centre and against budget.

'Our offering is unique in the fleet market in that it allows the fleet manager to configure the look and feel of the dashboard to suit their own business requirements, and it's all encapsulated into our fleet software bundle so there's no shock having to purchase an additional business intelligence tool to analyse it as there is with other systems,' said Mr Jackson.

'A powerful dashboard offering like ours will allow the user to make more informed decisions using benchmarking techniques, and could easily return savings fuel cost savings of 5% or more. For the Welsh fleet operator we mentioned, that's a saving of £310,000 on the annual fuel bill.

'In addition, our system is an all-encompassing ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) fleet solution. So, rather than having separate systems for logistics, fleet management and fuel management, you get the complete fleet management toolset, including an advanced dashboard offering, to manage everyday back office tasks, like fines, maintenance, duty of care, grey fleet and all vehicle details,' he added.