It’s Monday morning and trucks are moving between warehouses and retail distribution centers across Zambia. By the end of the week there will be hundreds of trips, refueling stops, driver receipts, overnight stops, and thousands of liters of diesel to account for.
Fleet fuel tracking with our telematics platform makes that job easier.
The challenge
A logistics company based in Zambia operates a fleet of 80 delivery trucks transporting goods between regional warehouses and retail distribution centres. They have to deal with regular fuel hikes, suspected fuel theft at overnight parking locations, and lack of visibility into refuelling activities.
Their first inclination is just to reduce fuel spend, but the problem isn’t so one-dimensional.
The solution
Live vehicle tracking
Fleet managers monitor fuel levels in real time through the live tracking dashboard in the 3Dtracking platform. If a truck reports abnormal fuel levels during a delivery route, managers can immediately investigate the trip.
Imagine a truck halfway through its delivery route. Its fuel level suddenly looks much lower than expected. The manager can immediately open the trip and see where the vehicle is, whether it has been moving, where it stopped, and what happened around the time the fuel level changed.
Instead of starting with a vague question - “Why did this truck use so much diesel?” - the team has a specific event to investigate.
Alerts
If a truck is stationary and its fuel level suddenly drops, a fuel sudden decrease alert can notify the relevant people immediately. Refueling is monitored in much the same way. When a truck takes on fuel, a refill alert records the event and notifies the control center team.
Every vehicle carries a massive amount of data. Alerts bring the important details to the forefront, so fleet managers don’t have to waste time trying to identify what needs urgent attention now and what is simply nice to know.
Reports
Fuel consumption by distance makes it easier to spot routes that are consistently less efficient, while refill reports show when and where fuel was added and by how much. Sudden decrease reports pull together unusual fuel drops with the time, location, and quantity lost, helping the team see whether the same truck, route, or parking area keeps coming up.
And when the fleet manager needs the bigger picture, the fuel summary report shows overall usage across vehicles, turning “our fuel costs are too high” into a much more useful question: which trucks, routes, and driving habits are influencing those numbers?
Fuel logs
Then there is the paperwork.
Drivers return with fuel receipts from different filling stations across their routes. Those receipts show what was supposedly purchased. They don’t show whether the vehicle actually received that amount of fuel.
By capturing those purchases in the fuel log and comparing them with refill events recorded by the vehicle, the operations team can check one against the other.
Fuel dashboard
More vehicles, more data. Often, that high volume of data is enough of a deterrent for any fleet owner who has a dozen other responsibilities and pressures to manage.
In the 3Dtracking platform, our fuel dashboard brings the key fuel information into one customizable view, so managers can quickly and easily catch unusual activity, compare fuel use with vehicle movement or driver behavior, and see where they need to investigate further. It gives teams a simplified snapshot of what’s happening across their fleet.
The results
By bringing fuel levels, vehicle location, driving activity, and fuel records together, telematics gives fleet managers the evidence to investigate everyday problems while there’s still time to do something about them - and stop them from happening again and again.
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Fewer incidents of fuel theft, thanks to immediate alerting.
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Lower fuel consumption, thanks to improved route planning.
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Safer driving, as a result of data-driven driver coaching.
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Accurate records comparing fuel purchases with consumption.
To see how fleets can go from incomplete fuel monitoring to easier fuel management, take a look at 3Dtracking’s fuel management solutions. Our platform gives your clients the information they need to answer operation-critical questions: Where did the fuel go? Which vehicles are using more than others? How can we cut costs?
Originally published: July 2019.
Last updated: September 2026.
