About Ketek Group

Headquartered in Edmonton, Alberta and proudly 100% Canadian since 1979, Ketek Group Inc. is one of Western Canada's leading providers of industrial services and rental equipment. For more than four decades, it has served the mining, oil and gas, pipeline, infrastructure and Utility sectors, backed by a rental fleet of more than 10,000 pieces of equipment.

It is a deliberately diverse business, hard to sum up in a single sentence, as Mark Hoggard, VP of Support Operations, is the first to admit. At its core, Ketek mobilizes skilled crews and equipment to wherever the work is. From a network of branches across Alberta and British Columbia, that means a large fleet of light-duty vehicles constantly on the move, carrying employees and equipment to job sites across a vast geography.

Mark oversees support services operations, including the fuel cards utilized in the day-to-day running of Ketek's light-duty vehicle (LDV) fleet. With roughly 250 vehicles in a mixed fleet of owned and leased units that fluctuates with job volume, keeping drivers fueled and accounted for is a constant operational requirement.

The challenge: a single vendor and a manual card program

Ketek runs two distinct fleets: a fleet of light-duty vehicles, essentially anything that isn't a semi-truck, and a separate logistics division of heavy tractor trucks. For the LDV side, two issues stood out. First, Ketek was effectively tied to a single fuel vendor. Second, and more demanding day to day, was the administration of physical fuel cards.

With the LDV fleet spread across branches in Alberta and British Columbia and a home base in Edmonton, simply getting a card into a driver's hands was a logistical chore. New employees at remote branches had to wait for plastic to be shipped to them, and cards had to be tracked, cancelled when an employee left or changed roles, and renewed when they expired.

The reporting was just as heavy. With only basic insights from the previous vendor, Ketek's admin team spent hours combing through physical receipts to confirm purchases were legitimate. Receipts came in late or not at all, and someone still had to sort through them by hand. For his team, Mark wanted to focus on higher-value work, this was an obvious place to find efficiency.

Why Fillip

When Mark set out to find a better option, he did his own market research. Some services were restrictive in what they offered, others locked to a single fuel network. A web search led him to Fillip, and after early conversations with Christian on the Fillip team, a few capabilities tipped the scale.

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• ‍Cards that go fully digital. Instead of shipping plastic, a card can be activated digitally and delivered to a driver wherever they are. For a fleet spread across branches hundreds of kilometers apart, that removes the biggest bottleneck in getting a new driver on the road.‍
• On-and-off control in seconds. Activating or deactivating a card happens almost instantly, with no lost plastic to chase and no missing cards to account for.‍
• Freedom to fuel across vendors. Rather than being locked to one fuel network, drivers can fuel at a range of vendors and still earn rebates, giving crews more choice on the road and capturing savings Ketek had been missing.‍
• Live spend data and paperless receipts. The team gets real-time visibility into fuel spend, and drivers submit receipts digitally, so nobody waits on paper to arrive from across the province.‍
• A portal built for everyday use. Managed from a straightforward web portal or mobile app, Fillip was easy enough for both administrators and drivers, smoothing adoption across a large, hands-on workforce.

Just as important, Fillip gave Ketek a low-risk way to test the platform first. Mark ran a trial with a defined group of drivers to confirm it did what it claimed and felt comfortable for the people using it every day.

"We were able to do a trial period, which for us was very beneficial," says Mark. "It let us assess whether it met our expectations and whether people were comfortable with it."

It did, and Ketek adopted Fillip as the primary fuel card provider for its LDV fleet.

The results: less admin, faster onboarding, and rebates Ketek was missing

Ketek is rolling Fillip out in stages, starting with the Edmonton home office before moving to the branches for early insights. Fort McMurray is onboarding drivers now, with three more branches to follow. The rollout is still underway, so the full numbers aren't in yet, but the operational wins are already clear.

• Administration, dramatically reduced. Removing the manual card program has been the biggest win. There is no plastic to ship, track or account for, and no lost cards to chase. Setting up a new driver now takes a fraction of the time it once did.
• Onboarding built right in. Card activation is now part of Ketek's standard onboarding process. When an employee earns their LDV license, they automatically receive their Fillip card and training. "They're ready to go right from the start, instead of waiting for a card to reach them," says Mark.
• Rebates Ketek was leaving on the table. With multiple fuel vendors now in the program, including Petro-Canada, a network Ketek's drivers use heavily, the company earns rebates on fuel it was already buying. "We were visiting those stations anyway when it was the only choice, but we weren't getting the rebate," says Mark. "Now we are."
• Real-time visibility, paperless receipts. Real-time reporting and digital receipt submission have replaced the slow, paper-heavy work of chasing and reviewing physical receipts, giving the office cleaner data with far less manual effort.

As more drivers come on board, the benefits compound. Higher fuel volume across vendors strengthens Ketek's hand in negotiating even better rebates, a conversation already underway with partners like Petro-Canada.

"The shift from a manual process to a digital one has just been time savings for us across the board," says Mark.

Looking to streamline your multi-location operations like Ketek Group? Get in touch with our team to talk about your needs.