While you probably remembered your significant other, kids, kids’ classmates, kids’ teachers, kids’ sitters, your assistants, your friends, and the list goes on… quite the greeting card smorgasbord of folks you can remember.  Did you remember your drivers?  It’s not too late.  Sure there’s driver appreciation week in the fall but why not give the gift that keeps on giving.  Give them access to their very own CSA Report – - FREE of CHARGE to both you AND the driver.  Remind your drivers to use www.roadsideresume.com or turn it on if you haven’t yet.   For those you that haven’t become a Vigillo subscriber yet (there are 1.3M authorities out there), you can sign up as an affiliate and offer this too free of charge to your drivers!  Check out our website at http://vigillo.com/drivers.html for further details or see our YouTube Chapter for Dan Baker videos on it as well.

When’s the next candy celebration day?  Maybe just days away – Friday’s coming right?  You’d think I was a dentist… or a dentist’s wife!

VIDEO RECORDING:
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SLIDES
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—By Wendy Leavitt, FleetOwner.com

Drivers are key to the success of any trucking operation, so it only makes sense to invest in how they are hired, retained and managed to be successful on the job. Implement a good driver-performance management program based on solid data and you could start to see results “almost immediately,”  speakers Don Osterberg, senior vice president of safety, security & driver training for Schneider National, Inc. and Al LaCombe, director of safety, training & security for Dupre’ Logistics, LLC told representatives of 240 companies who recently attended a live webcast sponsored by GreenRoad and presented jointly by Fleet Owner and the Truckload Carriers’ Assn. (TCA).

Osterberg told the audience that he had four “keys to success” when it comes to fleet safety: Hire the “right” drivers (and retain them); train them effectively; manage driver-performance actively, and leverage technology to enhance safety programs.

Traditional safety metrics are lagging, not leading indicators, he noted. Rather, he said Effectiveness flows from the ability to identify and proactively manage those leading indicators, and technology can definitely help to get the job done.

“Technology enables visibility to driver behavior,” Osterberg said.  “In the past, it was a crash that raised our awareness of an aggressive driver.   Now we can [use driver performance monitoring technology to help us] detect indicators of problematic behavior to enable interventions to remediate the behavior preemptively.”

Osterberg shared specifics about Schneider’s own driver monitoring and management program as well as insights the fleet has gained over time. For example, he said that in a study of the company’s top and bottom performers in terms of miles per gallon (MPG) “we found a correlation to crash risk: The top 100 drivers in terms of MPG also had a 37% lower accident rate than the poorest drivers in terms of MPG.”

“Success is achieved through layering of imperfect solutions,” Osterbeg observed, and it was a theme that LaCombe also voiced as he shared best practices from Dupre’ Logistics.

Like Schneider, Dupre’ layers multiple programs, practices and policies, one over another,  in an effort to create the safest possible fleet, including tracking crashes, lane change-related accidents, intersection-based events and roll-overs, as well as personal injury rates. The company also keeps a sharp eye on leading as well as lagging indicators by driver, such as the number of moving violations a driver is charged with over a given period of time. 

For both fleets, the goal is to initiate any necessary interventions quickly, appropriately and effectively. At Dupre’, the company’s driver-performance monitoring system will even automatically trigger certain training programs when a specific risk event occurs, according to LaCombe.

LaCombe called his driver-performance management system a “behavior-based performance system,” and noted that there are some 300 data points in the company’s performance modeling tool. “We do root-cause analysis down to the terminal level,” he said. We believe in stewardship, in everyone taking responsibility for the safety of their team.”

Creating a working environment that provides the most “normal life” for drivers is also a focus at Dupre’, according to LaCombe, who has spent 26 years in his current position. The approach, which includes set schedules for drivers and hourly pay vs. pay per mile, is an important part of the program.

A normal life means getting to be home for ball games and birthdays and family events, LaCombe noted, and to be able to do that, you need to provide a more predictable schedule. According to LaCombe, these policies actively support the company’s fatigued driving initiatives; results are measured on a monthly basis.

The speakers, both safety award winners (LaCombe was named National Safety Director of the Year by the American Trucking Assns. for 2011and Osterberg was honored with the Distinguished Safety Leader Award in 2010 by the Truck Safety Coalition), shared their expertise and their own experiences developing and deploying driver-monitoring and performance-management programs, especially focusing on how they can help companies to:

• Turn safety from an “intangible” benefit to a tangible benefit fleets can measure
• Improve fuel efficiency
• Reduce maintenance costs
• Help to develop and maintain a more loyal and professional driver pool
• Improve customer service
• Reduce risk

WEBINAR: CSA BY THE NUMBERS!
Vigillo presents a free complimentary hour-long webinar on CSA By the Numbers: trends, anomalies, unexpected twists and turns and…what to expect in the future!  All presented by Vigillo’s CEO, Steve Bryan.

UPDATE: Webinar slides & recording available HERE.

Sign up for the date and time of your choice:

CSA is changing again!

• 4 new texting violations have been added to the Unsafe Driving BASIC
• 22 new Vehicle Maintenance violations have been added

At Vigillo, we take pride in vigilantly monitoring CSA changes so our customers are among the first to see the impact of these changes.  We will be updating our scorecards and methodology as soon as possible with the new update.  More details below:

From the FMCSA:

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) has enhanced the Safety Measurement System (SMS) Methodology so that it includes violations based on new cell phone use regulations and provides more detailed breakouts of some existing brake, wheel, and coupling regulations. In February, when the January snapshot is released, motor carriers may notice the following two changes.

1. The addition of four texting and cell phone use violations in the Unsafe Driving Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category (BASIC) as outlined below. The violations reflect FMCSA’s decision on January 3, 2012 to ban commercial drivers from using mobile telephones while driving, which includes a ban on texting. Motor carriers should discuss the new violations with their drivers to ensure that they are aware of these requirements.

1. The addition of 22 Vehicle Maintenance BASIC violations that provide further breakouts of existing brake, wheel, and coupling regulations. This improvement will help to clarify who the responsible party is for the violations, either the motor carrier or the Intermodal Equipment Provider.

FMCSA is revising Appendix A of the SMS Methodology document to take these changes into account. The agency will re-post the document to the Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) Website at the same time the January SMS snapshot is released.

Source here.

Here’s how to get the Vigillo driver-related data you want and get it into Excel:

Before You Start:

• You need to be a current Vigillo CSA scorecard customer
• You need a spreadsheet program such as Micrsoft Excel.
• To include non-FMCSA data, such as driver number, active/inactive status, terminal or manager kinds of information, you need to activate Vigillo Custom Groups.  Custom Groups allow you to view groups of drivers the way they are organized in your company: by manager, by terminal, by region, by driver type.  Custom groups means customized to your organization.  Very useful!  Learn more about Vigillo Custom Groups here.

Step 1 – View the base data you want in Vigillo

• Log into Vigillo.  Go to My Reports.  Click the “Driver Scorecards” icon – soon to be renamed “Driver Essentials”
• Choose options for the data you want to see:

- DSMS or CSMS: Choose the 2-year Carrier View (CSMS) or the 3-year Driver View (DSMS).  FAQ here.

- Snapshot Date: Choose the data as of the most recent FMCSA update or earlier historical versions for data from the past.  FAQ here.

- Active/Inactive Drivers: In the Filter Data section, choose all drivers or inactive drivers.  FAQ here.

- Custom Group: In the Filter Data section, click “By Custom Group.”  Click on the Custom Group you want to see – For example: By Manager or By Terminals.  This may a be different label depending upon how your Custom Groups were setup.  FAQ here.

Step 2: Choose your Export Type

• In the Export Data section, click one of the three choices that you want:

1) Driver Summaries: Each driver’s data is summarized in one row across in up to 75 columns of data.  Great for comparing summaries of drivers or grouping into Custom Group related visualizations.  FAQ here.

2) Inspections & Violations: Each row represents an inspection and a specific violation from that inspection.  In other words – a clean inspection is one row, an inspection with three violations would take up three rows.  Very helpful when you want see inspection and violation related information – including by BASIC.  FAQ here.  Two special notes about inspections and violations:

- Time Frame: Rather than exporting the full 2 years (CSMS) or full 3 years (DSMS), you can choose to narrow the time frame of the inspections and violations you export.  For example – export just the last week or the last 6 months of inspections and violations.

- See What Falls Off: You can set the time-weight date for the export.  This allows you to see which violations will “fall off” or no longer be counted as of next month or at the end of the calendar quarter for example.  You will also see when the time-weight of violation are reduced from triple to double or from double to single.

3) Crashes: A straightforward export of crash data – one row per crash, including information such as date, injuries/fatalities, HazMat release, and other key crash information.  FAQ here.

Step 3: Export the Data Into Excel

• Once you’ve made your choice from the previous step, a new screen will load.  Click the blue export icon and choose “Excel.”

The data will now open into Excel.  That’s it!

Give it a try! You may find, like me , that once you have the specific data you want in a very friendly real-time interactive environment for analyzing data and pursuing what-if scenarios, you may see more than you expected.

In future posts I will provide examples of what you can do with this data in Excel.  Readers – let me know what specific things you’d like to see: top violations by terminals, charts with points by driver by manager?  Comment below…

A little filtering and I discovered 50,004 carriers with meaningful driver inspections and some measureable Fatigue BASIC score.  I also discovered that there is virtually no correlation between high OOS rates and high Fatigue BASIC scores (chart 1). This is reinforced by the fact that the 8000+ carriers with driver inspections but zero OOS rates had a nearly perfect normal (bell curve) distribution of BASIC scores (chart 2).

Moral of the story, study your data, know the story that lurks within, and ask the right question before you reach down to pet the cute little dog.

Chart 1

Chart 2

Okay, now moving beyond the frustration with DataQ’s and the methodology and the state-to-state discrepancies:

• This has not led to mass-firing of drivers!
• However, it gets harder to find CSA compliant drivers
• Fleets have seen contracts lost or not renewed due to bad CSA scores.
• Insurance rates have not changed significantly due to CSA scores, but underwriters are beginning to take an interest.
• Fleets have been identified as needing an intervention and notified by letter.
• A handful of these fleets have also received an investigation by the FMCSA and shut down due to bad practices.  (Granted, many of these would have been shut down regardless.)

But for most of you, the doors are open and the lights are on.

Obviously, there are many challenges still ahead in 2012:

• Crash Indicator BASIC – preventable vs. non-preventable crashes
• The generation of a HazMat BASIC
• An “improved” ISS score (due out this spring)
• The development of Safety Fitness Determinations
• Opening the FMCSA’s Pre-Employment Screening Program to companies that hire drivers but do not operate trucks (temp-agencies)

Hopefully we’ll blog more about all of this as 2012 rolls on.

Here at Vigillo we have the Knowing.  The knowing of things so powerful, so important, so life-changing that lives of Safety Directors everywhere will be forever altered.  Read more if you dare……….

OK!  Now that I’ve got your attention let me share with you some the knowing.  The key number in determining who gets the yellow alert triangle is your basic measure and the number within the basic meausure calculation that you need to focus on is total CSA points.  Most people understand this concept now that CSA is over a year old. 

The problem is that you have no way of knowing what your basic measure needs to be in order to get under the BASIC threshold and thus eliminating the yellow alert.  Another way to look at this is to ask yourself “if my BASIC measure is “x”, then what would my percentile ranking be?”  Vigillo knows the answer to this question.

Through our IQLab we’ve developed a product that can tell you how many points you need to lose in order to reduce your basic measure to a level that gets you below threshold.  We can do this because we can, using our super-secret wisdom machine, calculate what the basic measure is at threshold.  From there we can analyse total CSA points, points falling off over time and give you a specific target to shoot for that will get you under threshold.  A simple concept really……a clear goal that can be easily communicated to internal and external stakeholders.  Stain be gone! 

A customized CSA Point Reduction Analysis can be ordered from our IQLab and quickly have you on your way to a cleaner, brigter future.

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