Fuel is the second largest and most volatile operating cost for shippers, yet it often goes unmanaged. Traditional fuel surcharge programs rely on averages, often resulting in over or under reimbursement and directly impacting your bottom line. Fuel management offers a data-driven solution to this challenge, enabling shippers to control costs, enhance efficiency, and achieve sustainability goals.

This guide will explain what fuel management software is, its key features, and how it can advance your transportation network strategy. By leveraging real-time data and advanced analytics, you can move beyond averages, gain transparency, and actively manage your fuel spend.

Key Takeaways

Cost Reduction: Modern fuel management can reduce truckload fuel spend by up to 20%, replacing inaccurate surcharge programs with market-based fuel reimbursements.
Enhanced Efficiency: By integrating with your existing processes, fuel management automates calculations and provides data-driven insights to optimize your network.
Sustainability Gains: Accurate fuel consumption tracking establishes a reliable emissions baseline, empowering shippers to make measurable progress toward sustainability targets.
Fair Partnerships: Modern fuel management ensures fuel reimbursements are fair and accurate for both shippers and carriers, strengthening relationships across your network.

What is fuel management software?

Fuel management software is designed to help shippers track, manage, and optimize their fuel costs and consumption. Instead of relying on weekly national or regional averages, modern fuel management software uses real-time, lane-level data to calculate accurate fuel reimbursements for every shipment. This approach accounts for the specific price, time, tax, and geography of each movement, ensuring you only pay for the fuel that was actually consumed.

Why fuel management software matters in transportation

Diesel fuel can account for up to 30% of a shipper's total transportation spend. Given its price volatility, leaving this cost unmanaged creates significant budget uncertainty and exposes your business to unnecessary risk.

Fuel management software eliminates these inaccuracies by aligning reimbursements with the actual costs carriers incur at the pump. This creates transparency and fairness in your carrier partnerships while providing the data needed to make strategic decisions. By establishing a clear baseline of fuel consumption, you can also accurately track and manage your transportation-related emissions, turning sustainability goals into achievable actions.

6 Key features of modern fuel management software

When evaluating fuel management solutions, look for these six essential features that deliver the most value.

1. Real-time, market-based fuel reimbursements

The core of any effective fuel management software is its ability to calculate reimbursements based on real-time market data. Breakthrough’s Fuel Recovery solution, for example, considers four key variables for every freight movement:

Price: It uses wholesale prices, not the DOE's retail diesel index, to reflect the price your carriers actually pay at the pump.
Time: It captures daily fuel price changes, avoiding weekly averages.
Tax: It accounts for fuel taxes on a state-by-state basis, the way carriers pay fuel taxes.
Geography: It calculates prices specific to the individual lanes your goods travel.

2. Fuel forecasts

Volatility in the fuel market makes budgeting a significant challenge. Advanced software provides fuel price forecasts that help you anticipate future costs and mitigate budget uncertainty. These data-driven projections allow for more accurate financial planning.

3. Benchmarking tools

To understand your network’s performance, you need to compare it against relevant industry benchmarks. Leading software provides tools to benchmark your fuel efficiency and linehaul rates. This helps identify areas for improvement and ensures your operations remain competitive.

4. Integration

Fuel management software should not operate in a silo. It needs to integrate seamlessly within your existing technology stack, including your Transportation Management System (TMS) or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Breakthrough’s solutions are system-agnostic and integrate with over 45 TMS platforms, ensuring a smooth implementation process without disrupting your workflow.

5. Sustainability metrics

As sustainability targets move to a present-day reality, companies are feeling the pressure. A recent Harvard Business Review study revealed that 32% of companies are accelerating their sustainability efforts, with another 53% holding steady or consistently working toward their goals. In this competitive landscape, understanding your transportation emissions is essential to building a resilient, efficient, and cost-effective transportation network.

Effective fuel management software provides the data needed to turn sustainability from a broad initiative into a series of actionable, data-driven strategies. Tools, like Breakthrough's CleanMile solution, offer detailed insights into your transportation network's total lifecycle carbon emissions. Imagine being able to filter this data by lane, distribution center, or carrier, allowing you to precisely identify and act on opportunities to reduce both scope 1 and 3 transportation emissions.

6. Predictive analytics

The future of fuel management software lies in predictive analytics. By leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning, fuel management software can analyze historical data to identify patterns, predict future demand, and recommend transportation network optimization opportunities. This proactive approach helps you stay ahead of market shifts and continuously improve efficiency.

How fuel management software supports load optimization

Load optimization and fuel consumption are directly linked. Fuel management software provides the granular data needed to make load planning more effective. By analyzing fuel consumption and costs on specific lanes, shippers can identify opportunities to optimize load fill and make data-driven adjustments.

For example, a company might discover that they are shipping multiple LTL shipments on a given lane, when they could combine shipments and reduce fuel consumption. Case studies show this level of insight drives significant savings. A modern beverage company, for instance, optimized over 5,500 loads and reduced the lane count by over 130 lanes. This saved the company over $4 million dollars in efficiency and cost savings.

Choosing the right fuel management software

Selecting the right partner is crucial for a successful fuel management strategy. When evaluating fuel management software providers, consider the following criteria:

Industry Fit: Does the provider have experience working with reputable brands in your industry?
Scalability: Can the solution grow with your business and adapt to changing market dynamics across different modes and geographies?
Data Quality: Is the data used for calculations accurate, timely, and comprehensive?
Integration Capabilities: How easily does the software integrate with your existing processes?
Sustainability Support: Does the solution offer robust tools to help you track and reduce your transportation emissions?

Breakthrough’s approach to fuel management

Breakthrough offers a series of fuel management solutions to support your transportation network strategy.

Fuel Recovery

Breakthrough offers the transportation industry's only market-based fuel reimbursement solution, Fuel Recovery. Instead of relying on fuel surcharge programs, we use real-time, lane-level data to calculate fair and accurate fuel reimbursements. This approach ensures carriers are made whole on their fuel expenses.

Our clients typically achieve a 10x ROI in the first year and reduce their truckload fuel spend by up to 20%. Our solutions extend globally and across various modes, including marine and rail, providing a holistic view of your transportation network.

T-Fuel

T-Fuel, a customized risk management tool, helps create budget certainty by enabling you to lock in a fixed wholesale price for the fuel consumed to move goods to market. By combining market expertise with advanced analytics, T-Fuel empowers you to gain greater control over your transportation spend.

Enterprise Fleet Solutions

For companies managing their own fleets, our Enterprise Fleet Solutions deliver data-driven tools and strategic partnerships to optimize fuel costs and reduce emissions. From fuel card discounts to route optimization to reduce fuel consumption and emissions, our solutions are designed to drive measurable results for private fleets.

The future of fuel management software

The future of fuel management software is moving beyond traditional fuel surcharge programs toward more holistic fuel strategy. This next generation of solutions will unlock unparalleled efficiency by integrating real-time data to track fuel efficiency by load and identify alternative energy availability across your network. This visibility will enable shippers to not only see which carriers have fleets that consume alternative energy, but also gain access to market-based pricing to reimburse them accurately. By connecting fuel consumption data to shipments, shippers and carriers can collaborate more effectively to reduce both costs and emissions, building a truly sustainable and efficient transportation network.

Looking for fuel management software?

Making the switch from traditional fuel surcharges to a data-driven fuel management program is one of the most impactful changes you can make to your transportation network. It delivers immediate cost savings, brings greater transparency to carrier relationships, and provides the insights needed to build a more efficient and sustainable supply chain.

Fuel management software FAQs

What does fuel management software do?

Fuel management software helps shippers gain greater control of their transportation fuel costs by calculating market-based reimbursements for every shipment. This data sets the foundation for continuous improvement opportunities, including fuel efficiency improvements, mode conversion, and emissions reduction.

How does fuel management software help reduce costs?

Traditional fuel surcharge programs are based on national or regional averages, which can lead to inaccurate costs. Fuel management software allows you to get more granular, reducing costs by bringing transparency to your transportation fuel spend. By replacing outdated surcharge programs with a market-based approach, you can calculate fuel reimbursements based on the real-time price, time, tax, and geography of each shipment. Shippers who use Breakthrough's Fuel Recovery solution typically reduce their fuel spend by 20%.

What industries benefit most from fuel management software?

Any industry with significant transportation spend can benefit. Breakthrough works with leading household brands across retail, food and beverage, consumer packaged goods (CPG), automotive, paper and packaging, pharmaceuticals, and durable goods. Companies with large and complex supply chains see the most substantial impact, as the fuel management software brings clarity to volatile fuel costs.

Can fuel management software improve sustainability?

Absolutely. By accurately tracking fuel consumption for every shipment, fuel management software establishes a precise transportation emissions baseline. This visibility is the first step toward a measurable emissions reduction strategy. Tools like Breakthrough's CleanMile solution provide both strategic frameworks and expert support to develop and execute targeted emissions reduction initiatives, directly contributing to your sustainability goals.

How does fuel management software integrate with other systems?

Leading fuel management solutions are developed to be system-agnostic, integrating seamlessly with your existing technology. Breakthrough’s solutions, for example, can integrate with more than 45 different Transportation Management Systems (TMS). This ensures a smooth implementation process and allows the software to work within your current operational workflow without causing disruption.

Nick Kornaus

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