Who decides when and why a fleet driver becomes ‘high risk’?”

Many fleet managers have a gut feeling about who their worst drivers are but in truth, the reasoning behind that feeling can often be subjective and anecdotal, sometimes it is arrived at through personal experience but rarely is it based on incontrovertible empirical risk management evidence? 

The reason is because it is actually quite difficult to ensure that the correct drivers are selected for the correct reasons and that the correct remedial action is applied because in all organisations there are forces in play that can often prevent accuracy and fair play. 

So, the questions to ask in order to get this right should include: 

• Who’s doing the measuring of driver risk or is it system driven?
• What set of measures are being used?
• Are the measures of risk consistently applied?
• Who judges the severity of the discovered risk?
• How often is the measuring of risk carried out?
• How accurate are the results?
• What external influences are applied to the results?
• Who decides (and how quickly) what to do about the results?
• Who measures the success of any remedial action taken?

In addition to these questions, a fleet must rely on the broadest set of measures before investing in driver training because multi-source inputs to decision-making will demonstrate patterns, confirm or deny any subjective thoughts and remove any objections from the driver.

Please contact us now if you’d like to know more about how best to identify and reduce high risk driving.

At RVM our integrated approach allows us to help fleets to implement effective safety policies, analyse trends and identify high risk drivers. Our Driver Training program is targeted, timely and appropriate. The result is lower accident rates, improved driver safety, and reduced costs

What's the point of Telematics if you don't use it?

The majority of fleets now use one of the seemingly numerous telematics solutions available in the UK.  These systems use a combination of technologies to monitor other road users, location, speed, driving behaviour, fuel usage, idling time and several other important aspects of driver and vehicle performance. 

Apart from the most obvious advantages these systems offer such as tracking and speeding, there are a number of lesser-known applications for the technology that would create even more savings and safety if the available data stream from ‘black-box technology’ were only managed properly. 

Notwithstanding these other benefits, it is incredible how many fleets we encounter who go to the effort of identifying a need for telematics, trawling the market for a suitable system, obtaining Board approval for the investment, implementing the fitting of units over many weeks and then, unbelievably, failing to act on alerts issued by the system and never even looking at the provided online Portal. 

This raises a number of important questions:

• Are some telematics systems being bought simply to tick a few legal compliance boxes
• Do fleets fail to allocate the job of managing the telematics data feed to somebody knowledgeable and with time available
• Does the allocated person with responsibility for managing the data have no authority to act upon it?
• Has the accumulated data proved to be difficult to access or indeed to be unreliable?

As telematics providers don’t offer the management service, it seems the main responsibility for interpreting and acting upon data produced by black-box technologies lies with the end-user fleets unless the fleet chooses to outsource that responsibility to a fleet risk management company that includes such a service within its range of products. 

The job of work to manage the data stream can vary hugely according to the quality of the output offered by the various telematics systems and therefore a fleet should consider this aspect of the system they choose.  In fact it may pay dividends to involve the risk management provider in the process of procuring the best system. 

So what’s at stake here? In a nutshell, those fleets that fail to use their telematics data stream properly may lose the opportunity to reduce claim frequency, may fail to evidence liability positions in loss recovery and third party claim situations, may lose the chance to reduce expensive insurance premiums, may threaten brand reputation and may also miss the chance to improve the safety and productivity of their drivers. 

RVM Assist is based in Leeds, West Yorkshire and has been successfully analysing telematics data stream for its fleet clients for the last 5 years.  It is one of the UK’s longest standing full service providers of consolidated fleet risk and accident management services. For more information, visit www.rvmassist.co.uk or call us on 01132248800.

At RVM our integrated approach allows us to help fleets to implement effective safety policies, analyse trends and identify high risk drivers. Our Driver Training program is targeted, timely and appropriate. The result is lower accident rates, improved driver safety, and reduced costs