Why a quarter of your engineers' fuel achieves nothing

A service route is the sequence of journeys a field engineer makes between customer sites over a day. Part of that mileage produces no service call at all. On average, it accounts for a quarter of the total.

In plain figures: one engineer burns roughly £3,337 of diesel a year, around £834 of it on miles nobody needed to drive. Across forty engineers, the gap reaches £33,400 a year. That is what Nomadia Field Service Management is built to address.

What your fuel budget does not separate

A fuel invoice gives you a total. It does not tell you which share of that total paid for useful travel.

The underlying sum is straightforward. An engineer drives around 15,500 miles a year. The van uses 11.3 litres per 100 miles. That comes to 1,750 litres, or £3,337 at the price recorded in the UK in mid-September 2026 (190.7 pence per litre). Multiply by forty: roughly £133,500 a year.

Most service directors know that number. What they do not know is where the avoidable 25% sits.

A structural pattern, not a driving problem

The first instinct is usually to look at the engineers: eco-driving training, speed limits, individual consumption tracking. Those levers are real, but they move a few percent.

Wasted miles do not come from how people drive. They come from how the route was built, before the engineer turned the key. A journey removed by better allocation saves 100% of its fuel; driving that same journey more smoothly saves about 5%.

Why the gap is structural

When a route is built by hand, on fixed territories, or simply carried over week to week, the gap is not an accident. It repeats every day, for the same reasons.

A human planner handles constraints in sequence: emergencies first, then fixed appointments, then everything else. Each decision closes off options for the next. An optimisation engine weighs them together.

5 sources of wasted mileage on a service route

1. Allocation follows a fixed territory. The nearest engineer is not the one dispatched, because the territory was drawn once, sometimes years ago.
2. Two neighbouring jobs, two engineers. They fall on the same day in two different territories. Each engineer drives the full journey from their own base.
3. Unnecessary depot returns. A mid-day stop to collect a part or drop off paperwork that could have been avoided or bundled.
4. Emergencies replanned over the phone. An unplanned job breaks the route. The rest is rearranged with no view of what each option costs.
5. Deferred jobs. Customer absent, part missing, no site access: the van will come back. The miles are paid twice for one job.

These five have one thing in common: none of them is fixed by an instruction given to the engineer. All of them are fixed in the plan.

That is what an optimisation engine does: customer time windows, certifications, estimated job duration, statutory breaks, depot returns. The Nomadia AI engine weighs more than 200 constraints together.

What you can do before the next invoice

Start by establishing your real fuel cost, per engineer and across the team. Without that figure no decision is possible: not travel pricing, not territory redesign, not the choice between hiring another engineer and planning the ones you have more effectively.

Nomadia is a European software company specialising in field mobility. More than 200,000 users across 95 countries run their service calls and routes on its solutions every day.

Frequently asked questions

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