Fact No. 1: Vast amounts of data are available to trucking companies. Besides getting real-time data from telematics, ELDs, dashboard cams and transportation management software (TMS) components, companies gather data from insurance providers and public databases that include motor vehicle records, VIN records and federal safety collections.
Fact No. 2: The transportation industry is placing an ever-stronger emphasis on safety. Companies are prioritizing investments that can improve driver training, avert nuclear verdicts, mitigate risks and manage insurance premiums.
Let’s bring these two facts together by suggesting ways that data can and should be used to address safety concerns.
Ideally, one platform could pull data from disparate sources and compile it into an easy-to-use mechanism like a driver scorecard. Otherwise, management teams are inefficiently stitching together data points and working with inconsistent formats and outputs, all of which makes forming predictions and correlations much harder to do.
Assuming you have a system like this in place or are moving toward it, let’s take a look at how unified data can help make you safer. The key is to leverage and analyze the data to pinpoint potential risks, and then respond to those risks with concrete actions to reduce the risk levels.
Preventive driver training
Data can be applied before and after accidents happen to provide extra training for the most at-risk drivers.
Post-accident training would obviously be based on whatever incident has occurred. The sooner the training happens after the accident, the better. Reinforcement or remediation of certain material can help prevent the inciting behavior and thus reduce future accidents. It can also be offered to insurers as good faith proof of efforts to mitigate future risk.
