Aaron huff is senior editor of Commercial Carrier Journal. E-mail ahuff@ccjmagazine.com or call (801) 754-4296.

One of the presentations at the recent Qualcomm Vision 2008 users conference in San Diego discussed what would be the “next big thing” in the industry. When C.R. England, the largest refrigerated carrier in the nation, showcased how it uses predictive modeling to improve safety, the “next big thing” suddenly became very real.

Carriers use various programs, initiatives and technologies to improve safety – and for a good reason. There are no silver bullets. Fleets must consider many different and unique factors that contribute to accidents and other types of risk.

The goal of most safety managers, however, is the same: target their efforts at drivers with the greatest risk, and manage those efforts effectively, says Chad England, vice president of safety, training and recruiting for the Salt Lake City-based company.

In 2005, England started an information technology project to target the company’s safety efforts and resources toward drivers with the highest risk. The plan was to create profiles of driver safety performance. England submitted the requirements of the project for approval, but it proved to be too complex for the company’s internal resources.

In early 2007, England approached FleetRisk Advisors (www.fleetriskadvisors.com), a company that provides technology-based risk management and loss control services for the transportation industry. The technology and modeling techniques developed by FleetRisk were much more comprehensive than the profiling idea England says he originally had considered.

When FleetRisk visited C.R. England’s headquarters, analysts extracted three years of data and more than 1,800 separate data elements from multiple databases at C.R. England; this data then was assembled into a C.R. England-specific relational database to facilitate modeling and analytics.