A Closer Look at Merridale FuelWorks’ Exception Reporting

One of the most significant needs for any fleet operator is to regularly identify where vehicles and drivers are falling below expected tolerances to maintain fleet performance levels and in turn reduce fuel outlay.

Merridale’s web-based fuel management and reporting software, Merridale FuelWorks, has been empowering fleet operators for more than a decade with the essential tools and data that form part of any robust fleet management process. It is with such detailed reporting, available as standard, that provides one of its most powerful features.

A significant advantage offered by Merridale FuelWorks is the ability to create exception reports, also known as rogue reports. These can be scheduled for management to receive automatically by email for immediate attention without having to access the software, saving the precious admin and processing time.

Exception reports can be set up to rapidly identify and report on any vehicle or driver in the fleet that achieves a performance reading outside of an acceptable range, previously set by the user. The report can be automatically filtered to look at a single vehicle, a selection of your fleet, or all vehicles at once including by depot, department, engine size, make, and model of vehicles.

Merridale FuelWorks can capture the driver details for each transaction, which means that fleet managers can also consider whether a driver change has caused the change in performance and whether some driver training is required.

Exception reporting can also be configured to report on vehicles and/or drivers that produce statistics that are often seen as being too good. Whilst any fleet operator might want to praise drivers that perform exceptionally well, it is not unknown for some drivers to attempt to trick the system by failing to fully fill the vehicle. One method of identifying this is to monitor the transaction immediately following an exceptionally good figure, which in most instances will then show an unusually low figure as the vehicle needs additional topping up.

For large fleets, fuelling reports can be rather long, excessive, and full of transactions. Exception reports can be used to save trawling through a large common report looking for anomalies. For example, regular small fuelling transactions that occur outside the normal hours of business. An exception report could be configured to show details of any fuelling transactions of less than a given number of litres thereby indicating if a driver may have fuelled smaller receptacles with the idea of filling their own vehicle.

Another exception report may, for example, show you any fuelling transactions that took place between the hours of midnight and 5am. Reported separately, this information is much more useful and actionable whereas, hidden in and amongst a larger report, these anomalies can be easily missed.

There is no limit to the number of exception reports that can be configured. A report can be made public so that other users in the business can access the report or these reports can be set up as private so that only the report creator can receive them.

To find out how Merridale FuelWorks could benefit your company, contact Merridale on 01902 350700 or visit www.merridale.co.uk.