One of the biggest challenges a fleet manager faces is managing driver safety. Reducing risk and improving safety across the fleet is essential to keeping insurance premiums low, minimizing downtime, and preventing expensive and unnecessary maintenance costs.
The National Safety Council states that distracted driving causes more than a million collisions each year. The cost of accidents and vehicle damage adds up quickly when you factor expenses associated with damaged vehicles, increased insurance premiums, and lost profits from driver or vehicle downtime.
Running an efficient profitable fleet-centric business that aims to provide optimal customer service starts with keeping fleet operational costs low and productivity high. And since safety is just one stop on your businesses’ long-term roadmap, finding a solution that unifies assets, people, and technology is key to planning for long-term goals.
Harness Insights, Incentivize Drivers
The power of big data is limitless. Analytics used daily to predict consumer buying behavior by stalwarts like Amazon to show you items that you are likely to purchase. Similarly, telematics solutions have evolved from simple vehicle tracking to making predictions based on historical driver behavior data to model future risk. There are thousands of pieces of information collected each day that your telematics system makes available to make informed business decisions.
In fact, connecting driving behavior to back-office systems create a unified data view of business operations availing insights that improve fleet safety and mobile workforce performance, ultimately automating the processes that support total operations excellence.
Knowing that a driver’s frequent hard braking is likely to cause accidents, fleet managers can use this insight to create a customized coaching plan to correct the costly unsafe habit. If proactive safety programs are successful, accidents, driver injury, and vehicle damage can be prevented, driving down the total cost of ownership.
Creating a proactive safety strategy based on data-points in real-time requires having the right software in place as a future-proof business investment. And some advanced platforms take safety a step further through gamification to ensure operators are confident that monitoring is not used as a form of punishment. Driver compliance is crucial to running a safe fleet, but some drivers are still skeptical knowing that their behaviors are monitored. The goal is to get drivers involved and show them how gamification technology benefits them.
Gamification incentivizes drivers to improve their behaviors on the road. By keeping score of their good and bad behaviors and comparing those numbers to their peers is a proven strategy to drastically improve fleet safety. Read the full article.
