Data integration helps managers and drivers work smarter, faster.

McAlister Oil used to depend on paperwork filled out by its drivers to provide customers with important details on fuel deliveries. After fueling, drivers would slide paper tickets into pump meters, stamp the quantity of fuel dispensed, fill in other fields by hand, and return the tickets to the office for processing.

In October 2007, Scott Shank, general manager of the Wellington, Kan.-based company that fuels locomotives onsite for a major railroad, started a project to provide real-time electronic delivery data to customers. McAlister Oil installed electronic fuel meters and the PeopleNet BLU onboard computing and mobile communications platform on all of the company’s 15 trucks.

Today, after fueling a locomotive, a McAlister Oil driver enters the locomotive ID using an in-cab touchscreen display. The pump meters transmit a signal to the PeopleNet computer through a hard-wire connection. BLU converts the signal into gallons and populates an additional nine fields of data that include the location, date and time of fueling.

Each transaction set is available immediately online to McAlister Oil and also is integrated directly into the customer’s information systems via file transfer protocol (FTP). “We were the first company nationwide to provide this service to the railroad industry,” Shank says. “This is the highest level of accountability we can give.” And in so doing, the company eliminated four daily man-hours that had been spent preparing invoices. The company also can hold drivers accountable for every gallon of fuel dispensed, Shank says.

McAlister Oil is just one of hundreds of fleet operations that are adopting an end-to-end integrated approach to improve the efficiency and integrity of its business information. The latest hardware and software applications are able to easily abstract and access data from one system, and read and write data to another system. This flexibility has opened many new possibilities for fleets to create more intelligent, automated workflows for drivers and managers alike.

Integration in the cab
Today’s mobile devices have virtually the same operating systems, database functionality and connectivity as the PCs and servers in an office environment. This next generation of mobile computing power has made it possible to manage increasingly complex requirements for data that originates on the vehicle and data that is shared between the vehicle and office.