If your fleet has negotiated fuel prices with certain vendors, you can share that information with drivers via CoPilot. Drivers can then select the best fuel stops along a route based on price, location, and Hours of Service (HOS) break requirements.
In this article:
How to Set up Custom Fuel Price Management
The ContentTools and Account Manager web tools are required to send custom fuel prices to CoPilot. Contact Trimble Maps sales or support if you are not licensed for these tools or if you do not have a current login.
Initial Setup
Create a .CSV file of your negotiated fuel locations with the following fields: Name, Address, City, ZIP, and State or Country (Europe). For each location, enter in the Name field a combination of the name of the fueling location and its price. (Example: “$6.299 Flying J”). (Go here for instructions on how to concatenate two fields in Microsoft Excel.)
ContentTools Setup
In ContentTools, you are going to upload the .CSV file as a Place Set. Place Sets are the way ContentTools organizes similar types of locations. In this case, create a Place Set titled "1 Co Appr Fuel" or something similar a driver would recognize as company approved fuel stops when viewing it in CoPilot.
After creating the Place Set, you will import your .CSV file to save all of your fueling locations as Places within that Place Set. To do that:
- In the Place Sets panel, click on Import.
- Choose File > and select the .CSV file that contains fuel station locations.
- ContentTools will take you through a series of steps to verify the location information in the .CSV.
- Click on the Replace Set option in the Set Details dialog, then Finish.
Account Manager Setup
Once your fuel stations are imported into ContentTools, you have to assign that newly created Place Set ("1 Co Appr Fuel") to a specific group or groups of vehicles running CoPilot. This ensures those places, and their fuel prices, appear in CoPilot. The setup is done in Account Manager's Configure Fleet Settings:
- If a Vehicle Group doesn't already exist, create a group of vehicles to which you want to assign the fueling locations.
- On the Vehicle Groups page, select a Vehicle Group. Click on the Assign Custom Places, and select the newly created Place Set ("1 Co Appr Fuel"), and select Save.
- This new Place Set will be available in CoPilot the next time CoPilot is closed and re-launched on a device or at a time set by the Fleet Sync Interval in a Configuration Profile.
How Drivers Add Fuel Stops
Your Fuel Stations are viewable in CoPilot when a driver searches for a location to add as a stop on a route. A driver searches for Places by:
- Tapping on Search (the magnifying glass icon) and selecting the three dots icon > Company Places. This opens a list of the company Place sets created in ContentTools.
- Select "1 Co Appr Fuel" to filter out everything but the company approved fuel stops.
- At the top of the Search Places screen, tap the bar that reads Nearby and select Near Route, Nearby, or a specific Other City, depending on where in your route you want to search for a fuel stop. (This assumes a route with multiple stops has been entered into CoPilot or the driver is in the middle of a route.)
- You can then Search Places by name, and tap on the desired fuel station to add it as a stop on the route. (The price from your .CSV file is displayed with the name of the fuel stop.)
- Or, you can tap the map icon and select a fuel location directly from the map.
Data Consumption
Daily transmission of 1,000 Places consumes approximately 200KB. Based on this, we project a monthly consumption of 3 to 5MB per month, per vehicle.
Updating Prices
As fuel prices change, you can edit your Place Set in ContentTools, or update the .CSV file and import it again using the steps above.
Creating Fuel Stops via API
This same process can also be done programmatically using our Places API. Contact our Support Team by clicking Submit Ticket at the top of the screen to learn more.