How Rockline Industries Used Fuel Management to Create Transparency

In 2009, Rockline Industries came onto the Breakthrough Fuel Recovery program, entrusting Breakthrough to help them take control of their fuel spend.

“Rockline has been a part of Breakthrough for 10 years. I really like how they are proactive, how they challenge the shippers to think differently” says Matt O’Connor, VP of Supply Chain at Rockline Industries.

By leveraging a market-based program like Fuel Recovery, Rockline was able to capture enormous savings in just their first 12 months on the program. By making fuel management central to their transportation strategy, they have not only avoided this cost annually but continue to bring new geographies onto the program and adjust their fuel efficiency.

“There is clearly a disparity between the national energy solution, the DOE, as well as the actual movements of everyday that provide a value proposition. The difference between wholesale and retail pricing is enormous.”

Rockline introduced the Fuel Recovery program to their carriers before it was common in the marketplace. An initial concern was that their carriers would respond negatively to a shift in fuel price calculation—but their implementation experience proved otherwise.

“The carriers fully understand the program and they’ve done it with others, so the implementation is not painful at all.”

Beyond simply calculating fuel on a lane by lane basis, Breakthrough helped Rockline create transparency in their network in other ways. One misalignment in traditional fuel accounting methods is the use of base rates.

O’Connor says, “The single greatest innovation is the notion of zero-based costing…we find that provides the true fuel transparency that we’re looking for in our relationship between ourselves and our carriers.”