If you have multiple employees behind the wheel at any given time, you must be confident that these drivers and others who share the road are safe.
Fleet risk management is a fundamental aspect of properly managing a fleet. It includes the tasks and programs involved in running a safe team of drivers and vehicles – working to avoid or minimize the impact of incidents, meet regulatory and compliance needs as well as uphold brand and company reputations.
We dive further into the benefits of prioritizing fleet risk management and the dramatic improvements that can be made from leveraging telematics data below.
In this blog, we’ll discuss:
- What Areas Does Fleet Risk Management Cover?
- What Are the Benefits of Prioritizing Fleet Risk Management?
- How Is Telematics Data the Missing Piece to Effective Fleet Risk Management?
- The Challenges of Centralizing Telematics Data
- Are You Maximizing the Value of Your Telematics Solutions?
Get Our Free Guide: Maximizing the Value of Telematics Data
What Areas Does Fleet Risk Management Cover?
Driver Safety
When it comes to fleet risk management, establishing and maintaining driver safety is critical. Companies must ensure that their drivers have the tools, knowledge, skills and confidence needed to make the right decisions. They can do this by establishing a proactive driver safety program.
A driver safety program should include these six components:
- A well-crafted driver safety policy
- A way to continuously monitor drivers
- A program for ongoing driver training
- A strategy for remediating poor driving behavior
- A means of recognizing safe drivers
- An expert resource that can provide guidance and evaluate your program
We dive into each of these components and discuss the countless benefits of establishing and enforcing a strong driver safety program in our webinar, 6 Steps to Implement a Comprehensive Driver Safety Program.
Compliance and Regulations
One of the biggest headaches fleet managers experience is keeping up with the rules that govern commercial fleet operations and all the related paperwork that surrounds it. It’s the fundamental responsibility of a fleet manager to ensure that their fleet complies with each of these regulations.
They must also make sure that:
- The fleet’s vehicles are all fit for purpose, inspected regularly and follow a planned maintenance schedule
- All drivers are fully trained to operate their specifically allocated vehicles
- All drivers are fully aware of the company’s safety policies and the broader compliance regulations that it operates in
- Each driver is in good health and holds a valid driving license
- The fleet’s operations provide realistic and reasonable working schedules with proper driver breaks built it
Fleet Maintenance
Maintenance is a vital part of fleet risk management, as it affects both driver safety and fleet efficiency. Beyond the importance of meeting regulatory requirements, if a vehicle is properly maintained and kept in good condition, it will be safer to drive. Companies need to monitor and be alerted of issues before they turn into costly fixes, and most importantly, jeopardize driver safety. Fleet maintenance also promotes better safety behind the wheel by ensuring drivers feel comfortable and confident knowing that their vehicle is in good condition to drive.
What are the Benefits of Prioritizing Fleet Risk Management?
Employee Safety
Fleet risk management ensures that a company’s drivers and other staff work in a safe environment. It also ensures that those drivers don’t put their own lives or those of others at risk.
Regulatory Compliance
An effective fleet risk management program ensures that a company’s fleet meets its compliance requirements, and thereby avoids the costly fines and legal battles associated with non-compliance.
Cost-Savings
Insurance costs, incident management costs and legal fees and fines are all significantly reduced through an effective fleet risk management program.
Brand and Company Reputation
Keeping a fleet’s operations out of the headlines for putting lives at risk and playing fast and loose with employee safety is a key business benefit. It helps maintain a company’s reputation, which at the corporate level is a paramount benefit of any fleet risk management program.
How Is Telematics Data the Missing Piece to Effective Fleet Risk Management?
The key to properly managing a fleet that prioritizes safety is establishing the right level of visibility into risk. This is why many companies have turned to telematics solutions, with the hope that they will have access to the insights needed to improve efficiencies and effectively mitigate risk.
Telematics has revolutionized the fleet and transportation industries in the last decade. Geotab, a top global telematics provider, has increased its market share by about 40% since 2020 and has more than 3 million commercial fleet subscribers alone. Telematics solutions like these offer a range of insights on driver behavior — from hard braking and speeding to the location and time of such events.
With this insight, both drivers and their managers can better understand driving patterns and identify existing risk factors. Further, these can be put into context by comparison to other drivers so that the risk can be ranked and training resources can be deployed accordingly.
Telematics systems and onboard sensors can also be combined with automated scheduling assistants to alert fleet managers when vehicles are due for service. This automating of vehicle maintenance means fleet managers can be proactive and planned about taking vehicles off the road for servicing. This optimizes fleet uptime and ensures that vehicles that require servicing are not in use.
Simply put, telematics can reduce crashes and prolong the life of vehicles – key parts of any fleet risk management program. But the complexity of these solutions creates additional challenges that can hinder their effectiveness.
The Challenges of Centralizing Telematics Data
While telematics solutions provide a wide range of benefits, they’ve also created new challenges: reporting from multiple data sources, inconsistent data and the new management task of staying on top of the data and the reporting.
A fleet operator facing this issue stated that “Our biggest barriers we currently face [with temelatics] are the multiple systems we use with little integration, duplication of workload, multiple data entry and no clear insight into trends or driver activity.”
These challenges require a solution that can aggregate and normalize this data, taking away the tedious, manual tasks that are required when relying on multiple driver data sources. Companies need a solution that provides clear insight for management action, rather than management being lost in the activity of just being able to understand the data.
With the ability to aggregate and normalize vehicle and driver data within a single view, fleet risk management programs take a huge leap forward in reducing risk and keeping people safe.
Are You Maximizing the Value of Your Telematics Solutions?
Are your telematics platforms easily accessible to your Risk & Safety team?
Are you analyzing telematics data in combination with any other types of driver data (regulatory, license, claims, etc.)?
If so, how much manual effort are you putting in to extract these insights?
To discover how you can centralize your data in a single place to better understand, assess and address driver risk across your fleet, download our free eBook!
