Safety is always a top concern for fleet owners given industry trends showing year-over-year increases in crash fatalities that involve large trucks and with the prevailing headwinds of accident litigation.
When accidents involve large trucks, the plaintiff’s counsel often uses the Reptile Theory approach to litigation to chase higher verdicts.
“With this approach, the counsel tries to paint defendant motor carriers, among other things, as failing to take reasonable steps to train drivers,” said J.W. Taylor, owner of Taylor & Associates, a transportation-focused law firm based in Winter Haven, Fla. “Properly documenting training and continuing education can be helpful in combatting these tactics.”
This week, several technology providers announced new products and integrations designed to help motor carriers better document their training processes and more fully utilize driver safety information to reduce risk.
Photo-documented training
Instructional design and learning company Luma “Brighter Learning” released a new camera-based authentication process for online driver training.
Luma’s new LumaLens feature captures time-stamped pictures of drivers completing online training to provide a more foolproof method of authentication.Authentication has always been a concern in distance education from online college courses to state certification exams. The stakes are higher in the trucking industry, and fleets that lack definitive proof of driver training events could potentially lose millions in accident lawsuits.
The new process from Luma is called LumaLens. It provides motor carriers with liability protection by capturing time-stamped pictures of users while they are completing training.
“As we continue to support the diverse training needs of the trucking industry, several clients are asking for a more foolproof method for documentation,” said Dr. Gina Anderson, chief executive officer of Luma. “We responded by developing LumaLens as the industry’s first automated method for photo capture of training events.”
LumaLens is available in the Luma eNugget learning management system (LMS), which also comes with a collection of nearly 500 customizable Luma eNugget driver training modules.
When a driver logs into the LMS to complete orientation or remedial training assignments, a pop-up screen informs the user that the camera of the laptop, tablet, smartphone or other device will periodically take pictures during the assessment portion of training.
Fleet administrators can configure settings for LumaLens in the Luma eNugget LMS. Some may want to limit who has access to pictures, for example, or turn on LumaLens for driver training, but turn it off for a different training group such as office employees.
A separate Reporting tab feature in the Luma eNugget LMS has a “permission logs” section that details how users responded to the LumaLens notification by accepting or denying permission to have the camera on their device capture photos during training events.
Consolidating safety data
As fleets look for ways to better manage their safety information, they often look for possibilities to consolidate their technology stack to have a single source of driver and vehicle data.
“We look forward to working with Samsara and their unique data systems,” said Conal Deedy, director of customer productivity solutions, Volvo Trucks North America.
Samsara serves over 15,000 customers across diverse sizes and industries that include transportation and logistics, field services, energy and construction.
Another new safety-related integration is available between Idelic and Lytx. Through this integration, fleets using Idelic’s Safety Suite alongside Lytx’s Driver Safety Program will be able to automatically connect their video telematics data from Lytx to Safety Suite to have a centralized view of driver safety.
Lytx and its DriveCam Event Recorder joins other third-party fleet systems currently consolidated into Idelic’s Safety Suite to help managers utilize their data to understand and predict risk. Other Idelic integrations include asset management, Electronic Logging Devices (ELD), human resources, training, citations and violations, applicant tracking and recruiting and pre-hire resources.
“The data collected by Lytx is an essential part of the overall equation for understanding driver risk,” said Hayden Cardiff, founder and co-CEO of Idelic.
