The Fuel Project Manager is a macro-enabled excel spreadsheet that is programmed to assist in calculating and estimating fuel consumption and cost for a given mission. It’s primary function is to be used as historical data for mission planning, as well as to be used to calculate fuel usage. I completed this project and presented it to the 552nd Wing Commander in December, 2019. During the creation and post completion of this project I received multiple awards for my efforts including:
The following information is a written summary of the presentation I organized for the 552nd Wing Commander.
I started this program to help my supervisor calculate fuel numbers more efficiently. This task effected both of us, considering we managed the Fuel Program for our squadron, and had to order fuel for each exercise. When my leadership told me that this program would be shared with other squadrons I decided to increase it’s user friendliness by fully automating the calculations and coding the Excel Workbook, so that any squadron could hand-tailor it to their particular needs.
To begin, I will first cover the basic features and functions of the program, and I’ll show you a preview of what the actual program looks like. Following the preview, I’ll summaraize what a year’s difference would look like, after using the program. And lastly, we’ll cover how the program effects mission planning and scheduling in area’s like, fuel storage capacity and fuel delivery. I’ll also run through the data we collected to make the final summary estimations.
First and foremost, the Fuel Project Manager is an Excel Document, meaning that anyone who utilizes Microsoft Excel 2016+ can access all the functions of the program. The only catch being, that it must be saved as a Macro-Enabled Worksheet. The program has an inital size of 650 kb and is small enough to be sent through the government’s Outlook application, making it easy to share and highly accessible.
When first opening the Fuel Project Manager, you will always be taken to the Fuel Projects home page. On the Home Page you’ll be able to add and edit projects, set budget and fuel goals, and access the input and output sheets of each project.
Moving on to the Equipment Types page, you’ll be able to add various equipment to your program. Once all of your respective exercise or squadron equipment types are loaded, you will be able to access them for any of your projects.
On the project input page–which can be accessed via the “Navigate Workbook Button”, or it’s respective “View Input” icon on the Fuel Project home page–you can choose one of your previously loaded equipment types and enter the desired number of units, mission total hours or distance, the average load, and the number of days of expected usage.
From the input page, you can open the project output. In the project output, you can view the total cost, total fuel, and the various individual fuel consumption totals of all the equipment items you previously inputted.
These four pages make up the Fuel Project Manager and concludes our program preview.
Previously, we would always budget fuel costs off of the worst-case scenario, with all operation and contingency units, running at 100% load 24/7. This method was based off of the respective equipment’s technical manual consumption rate, which is always listed at full load. For the Raging Bull Exercise, we used the Fuel Project Manager to calculate the projected scenario, in which we only planned on running operational units and based fuel amounts, not only off the technicals manual’s consumptions rate but also historical data and projected mission run times.
[!NOTE] The following numbers are based off the 729 ACS’s, 2019 Raging Bull Exercise. All estimated costs are based off of the 2019 Fiscal Year Fuel Cost of $2.88 per gallon.
[!NOTE] The numbers viewed here are based off of the gallon amount of fuel that was used during the Raging Bull Exercise. While the calculations are based off of the actual number of generator hours ran during Raging Bull.
As you can imagine, the number of man-hours and equipment wear can start to add up when you include the number of fuel deliveries required to be scheduled when using previous planning methods. Below you can see how fuel storage capacity and planning can affect the number fuel deliveries.
Now we’ll summarize what a year’s difference would have looked like, when using the Fuel Program Manager. In 2019, the 729 ACS (Air Control Squadron) participated in 6 exercises. If each exercise, had been comparatively the same as the “Raging Bull Exercise”, the 729 would have been able to save:
To conclude this presentation the Fuel Project Manager allows squadrons to: