Diesel Under Delivery and Diesel Theft
Preserving Fuel Supply Integrity and discouraging under reporting and theft at Remote Sites
One of the biggest risks of operating remote sites is a painful lack of oversight. Manual data collection and system updates also take a lot of time and manpower when multiplied by every site under management. Telecommunication companies, banks, eateries, pharmacy chains, etc easily come to mind.
Organizatons in these categories rely on a variety of internal teams and third-party services to take care of their sites. In addition to generator inspections required every 250 running hours, there are also teams that handle regular refueling and emergency response.
All of these people are given full access to sites in order to fulfill their duties and report irregularities, but this leaves the site owner without any direct knowledge of the day-to-day activities. Furthermore, the owner has no way to determine who is responsible for discrepancies in reporting or malfunctions that fly under the radar.
Inevitably, human error plays an outsized role in maintenance, collecting data, and securing sites. To the degree that business decisions and planning rely on their information, there are a lot of potential cracks for time and money to fall through.
Worst of all, it is difficult to filter personnel effectively, and occasionally unscrupulous actors enter the picture. These individuals, by malice or negligence, have total control over what companies are able to see at their sites.
Should a fuel truck stop its job short to save a few liters, or simply neglect to do its job at all, the person on site has full access to the data recording equipment that would tell the difference.
X-Tend’s Remote Fuel Monitoring Solution
X-Tend software platform records and organizes an incredible array of your asset and site performance data. After compiling that data into charts, graphs, and reports, we’re able to analyze patterns of irregular behavior and pick out anomalies.
We are also able to establish thresholds for a range of KPIs, including fuel metrics. These limits can help ensure assets perform as expected, and also help detect outlying behavior like sudden changes to configurations or recorded values. This includes an access log of which individuals access the site, in order to trace potential instances of vandalism or other criminal intent.
With our fully integrated solution, X-Tend is able to discover errors that reveal a trend of fuel theft. We are able to identify if someone has altered the data on the total daily runtime of the generators.
Because we track not only the runtime reported by the generator itself but also the runtime of the integrated relays, we can detect discrepancies in the generator runtime.
Furthermore, we are able to identify the individuals responsible for obfuscating the data, and by coordinating with customer are equally able to identify the third-party refueler responsible.
Customers are thus able to double-check the time their generator was operational against the projected uptime based on the quantity of fuel to get an accurate reimbursement.
Outcomes
In the period assessed, we are able to detect doctored hours which would have resulted fuel losses in thousand of liters.
Our solution is able to identify and put a stop to a pattern of behavior that could have gone on without detection indefinitely.
While only a handful of events are prevented, this pattern of deception is not isolated to a single fuel supplier and threatens to cause millions in losses over the lifetime of these sites.
Amidst the present increase in operational cost managing generators effectively has never been more important. Fuel prices have more than quadrupled in the past 4 years. There is thus an increasing incentive for fuel suppliers and site technicians to engage in shady practices to secure their bottom line.
With X-Tend’s ongoing monitoring, our customers are safe from any future corner-cutting or deliberate sabotage.