MONTREAL, Que. –It is almost free and there will be food! The Fuel Management 101 workshop offered by the Natural Resources Canada’s Office of Energy Efficiency (OEE) will be held on Jan. 27, in French, at the Hotel Mortagne, 1228 rue Nobel, in Boucherville (that’s across the St. Lawrence River from Montreal).

Anyone interested can visit http://fleetsmart.nrcan.gc.ca and click ‘Workshops’ to read about the event, register with FleetSmart and sign on for the workshop.

Fuel Management 101 is advertised as being for fleet managers, but do not be intimidated.

The workshop will suit small companies, even owner/operators -anyone who has the authority or responsibility for reducing their trucks’ fuel consumption, organizers say.

The cost of attending is just enough to cover expenses; ie. food -as little as $15-$20 per participant, depending. “We like to call it a nominal fee,” says Bob Smith, chief of the ecoENERGY fleet program.

Those who attend simply have to show up -no preparation is required; the hunting and gathering of fuel consumption data comes after returning to the office.

Participants will learn why they should have a fuel management plan, how to make a plan and how to benchmark their fleets’ fuel consumption patterns. They will also learn how to pitch a fuel management plan to management, implement it, analyze results and keep making more improvements.

“They learn how to gather information on their fleets. The group works through a case study, learns about a typical duty cycle, how to take a fleet inventory and how to take baseline (that is, consumption before implementing a fuel-saving plan) fuel measurements,” Smith says.

One section of the workshop is called ‘fun with formulas,’ designed for fleet managers who never had the chance to map out their fleet’s vehicles and how they are used.

“We look at options, compare costs, explain fiscal versus calendar year, how to annualize fuel use and kilometres driven,” Smith explains.

And as the Web site proclaims, “You will leave with many tips, ideas and a template for creating a fuel management plan for your fleet.”

Another Fuel Management 101 workshop will be held in Quebec City sometime before the end of March. The way these workshops are currently organized, FleetSmart staff will wait until enough people -about 12 to 15 -have registered their interest in attending a workshop (that’s done on the Web site too) then they set a date and place.

However, NRCan would like to change that, probably after April 1, and schedule, in advance, a whole year’s worth of workshops, with dates and locations.

The OEE Web site is worth browsing, and is quite user-friendly. But if you get lost, just return to http://fleetsmart.nrcan.gc.ca.