It started with an observation on a golf course. Mike McQuade saw a fuel manager from a large trucking company looking at his smart phone between shots.
“You must get a lot of e-mails,” said McQuade, co-founder of Zonar. It turns out the fuel manager was monitoring diesel prices. If they dropped a few pennies per gallon he was ready to lock in a fuel contract and save the company more than $100,000.
“How much fuel do you use?” McQuade asked in disbelief. “About $8,000 per truck per month,” replied the fuel manager.
“We barely have to move the needle to save that guy a lot of money,” McQuade remembers thinking.
Zonar, based in Seattle, develops mobile software applications for fleets. A couple weeks later, McQuade called the fuel manager with an idea that could save significant amounts of fuel.
“Would you be willing to work with us?” he asked. “We have data engineers that are great at collecting and doing big data analytics, but we need some real-world operators.”
“If you want to take a stab at it, I’ll help you,” the fuel manager said.
