Every fleet manager knows that safety can make or break a successful trucking company. Problems with vehicle inspections, driver behaviors, or other overlooked areas can swiftly render a once-thriving company impotent with violations, fines, and out-of-service notices. Of course, improving safety is almost always a multipronged undertaking, and many may not be sure where to start. This is where telematics plays a key role in risk management.
Experienced business owners may balk at the idea that telematics can tell them something they don’t already know about their fleet. However, while experience is always a good thing, successful businesses aren’t run on gut feelings alone—at least not for long. Trucking companies need to have reliable safety data for three reasons:
- Knowing where to focus. Even if a fleet manager knows there is a problem with driver safety, he or she can’t know whether it’s distracted driving, hard braking, speeding, or any other number of risky behaviors that can happen behind the wheel. With fleet telematics, trucking companies can know where to concentrate their safety improvement efforts so they don’t waste time, resources, and money on unnecessary interventions.
- Gathering and distributing resources. If a fleet manager approaches company leadership with a request for more tires, increased maintenance, and other costly expenditures, they aren’t likely to succeed without data. By proving that the funds are necessary to boost safety, fleets are much more likely to obtain the resources they need. Explaining the cost-benefit of safety measures with hard data is much more effective than banking on a hunch.
- Identifying trends. Fleets rotate through managers for several reasons, but it makes it difficult to track improvements in safety when everything is subjective to the previous manager. Using telematics provides clear insight into consistent problems, measurable improvements based on safety changes, as well as provides an opportunity to prevent problems before they occur. For example, fleet managers can look at the data regarding the most common denominator for collisions. Based on that info, they can cross-reference the telematics on their various trucks and drivers. This will allow them to pinpoint which vehicles need servicing and which drivers need additional coaching to improve safety and reduce risk.
Experience is a valuable resource for fleet managers and trucking company executives alike. However, instead of making business decisions based on intuition, these leaders can use their expertise to analyze the data to enact effective safety solutions. To learn more about how telematics can improve your fleet’s safety, contact the experts at DriverCheck.
