Relying on technology that was purchased more than 10 years ago was getting difficult. The fuel management system we were using at Lane Transit District (LTD) in Eugene, Ore., was purchased back in the mid-‘90s. It was beginning to show us more frequent failures and the company wasn’t making strides in modifying its technology to what is current for the public transit industry market. In this day and age, integrating that product with our fleet maintenance system was a little more complicated than we thought it needed to be.

We wanted a product that would be completely integrated with our maintenance management system and we wanted something where the technology was more up-to-date. We wanted to track fuel being placed into the vehicles, fuel consumption, which employee was doing the fueling — basically, we wanted to do better management of our fuel and fluid distribution.

We looked at several products and the integration with the existing maintenance management system was a strong determining factor. Most of the products essentially execute tasks the same way, use similar equipment on the vehicles to talk to the fuel islands, and they used similar equipment at the fuel islands to actually measure the amount of fluid being dispensed at the island.

Everybody says their program can integrate; integration normally translates into, ‘my system creates a text file for your system and how you import it is determined by you.’

We went live with Maximus’ FuelFocus in March of 2007. Implementation started in early March and we were in production by the end of the month.
Our primary challenge was coordinating the transition; rolling from one system to another.

With the system we chose, the transactions are put into our database, they create a transaction list of exceptions so any transaction that seems out of the ordinary, that’s a red flag issue. If transactions are within normal accepted parameters, they just go right on through the system and they’re recorded by the maintenance management system and the inventory control system — and boom, you’re done.

With that level of integration sophistication, we don’t have a lot of data entry to take care of.