How to run a fuel program at a trucking company.

1. Baseline what you spend before you change anything

Pull twelve months of fuel-card transactions. For each one you want the date, the truck, the driver, the station, the gallons and the price paid. Most card providers export this; if yours exports a PDF, ask for the CSV, because a PDF is not a baseline.

Split those transactions into in-network and off-network using your provider's site list. The ratio between them is your compliance rate, and it is the single number the whole program moves. Work it out before you start, or you will have no way to tell later whether anything improved.

Do not skip this because you think you already know the answer. Carriers routinely find that their compliance rate is materially different from what dispatch believes it to be, in both directions.

2. Map your network onto your actual lanes

A discount network is only worth what your trucks can reach. Take your ten busiest lanes and mark where the in-network stations sit along each one. You are looking for the gaps: stretches where a truck running low has no in-network option within a reasonable detour.

Those gaps are where your off-network fills concentrate, and they are not the driver's fault. Some of them you can fix by talking to your provider about adding a site; some you fix by planning the fill earlier, on the side of the gap where you still have a choice.

3. Set a compliance target, and make it somebody's job

Pick a number and name an owner. A fuel program without a named owner reverts to the driver deciding at the exit within about six weeks — this is the most common way fuel programs die, and it is quiet, because nothing visibly breaks.

The target should be reachable from your baseline, not aspirational. If you are starting from a middling compliance rate, moving it steadily is worth more than announcing a number nobody believes.

4. Get the decision to the driver before the tank forces it

This is the part that decides whether the program works. Everything up to here is analysis; this is operations.

The stop has to reach the driver while they still have enough range to take it. That means the trigger is the fuel level and the lane ahead, not a morning plan — a plan made at 6am is wrong by lunchtime, because the truck moved and so did the load.

Use the channel the driver already reads. Whatever your drivers use to talk to dispatch is the right channel; a new app that a driver has to remember to open is not, however good the routing behind it is. Keep the message short enough to act on at a wheel: the station, the exit, the reason, and a way to say no.

Give them a way to decline. A driver who cannot decline will simply ignore the message, and you lose the signal that would have told you why.

5. Reconcile every month against the card statement

Match each fuel-card transaction back to the stop it was supposed to be. Three things fall out of that match, and all three are useful.

Transactions that match an assigned stop are the program working. Transactions with no assignment are the fills nobody planned, which is your remaining leak. Assignments with no transaction are stops that were sent and not taken, which is either a coaching conversation or, more often, a legitimate reroute you did not know about.

Keep estimated and actual savings apart. An estimate made when the stop was assigned and a figure derived from the settled transaction are different kinds of number, and blending them produces a total that nobody can defend in a review — which means, in practice, a total that gets quietly ignored.

6. Coach on the numbers, not on the average

Fleet-wide compliance is a reporting number, not a management one. Break it down by driver, truck and lane, and the picture is almost always concentrated: a minority of drivers and a handful of lanes produce most of the off-network volume.

Then ask why, per driver, before assuming it is discipline. Common and fixable answers: the driver runs a lane with a real network gap, the driver plans fills around a familiar stop that happens to be off-network, or nobody ever told the driver the program existed.

The three numbers worth tracking

Everything else is detail on top of these.

• Compliance rate

  In-network fills as a share of all fills. The number the program moves, tracked the same way every month so the trend is real.

• Recovery per truck per month

  Derived from matched transactions, labelled actual. Per truck rather than fleet-wide, so growth in the fleet does not disguise a flat program.

• Unmatched transactions

  Fills with no corresponding assignment. This is the honest measure of what the program still is not seeing, and it should shrink.

Four mistakes worth avoiding

Starting with a dashboard. A dashboard shows a dispatcher what already happened; the program needs the decision to reach the driver before it happens. Reporting is the last part to build, not the first.

Rolling out to the whole fleet at once. Ten trucks for a month tells you what breaks, and what breaks is usually the data plumbing rather than the routing.

Measuring against a retail price feed you do not own. Savings computed against a published average are an argument; savings computed as your own contracted discount per gallon on confirmed in-network fills are arithmetic from your own contract.

Letting the program run without an owner. See step three. This is the one that actually kills fuel programs.