How much fuel does your fleet of delivery vehicles use each week? Which piece of your heavy equipment is using more DEF than it should be? Are any of your employees “borrowing” motor oil from your bulk supply?

If you don’t know the answers to these questions, then you need a fluid management system.

If you use bulk fuel, oil, lubricants, or other industrial fluids without a robust fluid management system in place, your on-site fueling operation is either taking up more of your time than it ought to or running—at least partially—on guesswork.

In this article, we’re going to look at a number of reasons why your business should partner with a reliable oil company that offers top-quality fluid management systems to help you take comprehensive control of every single aspect of your fueling and lubrication processes.

What Is a Fluid Management System?

No matter how many different fuels, lubricants, and other fluids you use, keeping track of tank levels, consumption, access to supplies, and who’s using how much of what fluid can be a chore. If your fleet of vehicles or equipment is larger than a few trucks or dozers, managing that by hand can quickly become a full-time job.

A fluid management system helps you by automating and streamlining multiple aspects of your company’s fueling, lubrication, and/or maintenance program:

• Dispensing solutions to speed up and simplify fuel, lubricant, and other fluid fill-ups
• Access control solutions to prevent unauthorized individuals from stealing fuel or other fluids – and to keep employees from misappropriating your valuable products
• Tracking options to allow you to monitor and account for every single drop of fluid dispensed by vehicle, operator, or both
• Monitoring solutions to provide real-time data about fluid levels
• Analytics and reporting to provide you with the data you need to make the decisions that are right for your business

Fluid Management Advantage #1: Easier Fill-ups

The most visible part of your fluid management system is the one that your team interacts with the most: your dispensing solutions. If your equipment operators are still lugging around heavy 5-gallon diesel cans, you’re losing time and – probably – fuel, as your valuable diesel has to be transferred at least twice before it ever makes it into an engine.

A sound fluid management system will include high-volume pumps paired with the same kind of familiar fuel pumps and oil nozzles as your local gas station or quick-lube. The high-flow, high-speed pumps ensure that each fill-up takes a fraction of the time as at a commercial pump, and the access control options (more on that below) ensure that your fluids are only being put to their intended use.

Fluid Management Advantage #2: Improved Product Security

How much of your annual budget goes to fuel? It’s probably a significant chunk of money – and as commercial fuel prices remain high, your fuel is also an incredibly tempting target for less scrupulous members of the public. While we know your team members are all perfectly trustworthy, we also understand that the company gas pump is a tempting target for an employee who’d rather not have to stop for gas on the way home.

Your fluid management system should offer various access control solutions to prevent unauthorized fuel usage. Many newer systems require employees to enter a PIN, tap a key fob, or provide some other credential to access fuel. Most will also track fuel by vehicle, so not a drop can be dispensed unless an authorized operator in an authorized vehicle is cleared by your fluid management platform.

Fluid Management Advantage #3: Reduced Management Overhead

Your fluid management system makes life easier for more than your drivers, operators, and maintenance team. It simplifies things for your back office, too, in a few different ways:

Simplified Monitoring and Ordering

Your fluid management system can deliver the real-time status of every tank at your facility. Just by checking your online account, you can know in an instant exactly how much diesel, gasoline, DEF, oil, or other products you have on hand.

If you partner with the right oil company for delivery of fuel and other high-volume products, your system can even automate your ordering process, allowing your service provider to automatically deliver a full tank’s worth of fuel as soon as you need it. Receiving the maximum quantity of fuel with each delivery allows you to leverage even better per-gallon bulk prices – and reduces the number of invoices your back-office team has to manage.

Simplified Program Management

Keeping track of your entire fueling program is easy when there’s an automated online tool that allows you to keep track of supplies, monitor consumption by vehicle/equipment, operator, or both, and provides you with detailed reporting. The analytics provided can help you identify issues before they become problems, such as recognizing that a particular vehicle that’s overusing DEF may have a problem with its SCR system or that you’re losing unaccounted fuel from a small leak in your diesel plumbing.

Your fluid management system ultimately saves you time, money, and hassle and gives you incredibly granular control over every drop of your valuable fuel, oil, and other products.

Are You Ready to Take Control of Your Fueling, Lubrication, and Maintenance Program? Walthall and TECALEMIT Are Ready to Help!

When you partner with Walthall Oil Company for your bulk fuel, lubricant, and other products, you also unlock access to a robust fluid management system from industry leader TECALEMIT. Their turnkey systems offer unprecedented control, convenience, and capability for fueling programs of any size. Give us a call today to find out how Walthall and TECALEMIT can work for you! (478) 781-1234

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