Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/319866
54 COMMERCIAL CARRIER JOURNAL | JUNE 2014 C O V E R S T O R Y : P R E D I C T I V E A N A L Y T I C S port him through his challenges." It's common to find certain behaviors point to a driver stressed for a personal reason – a pregnant wife, a sick child or a pending divorce. The solution is to decrease the stress, Jain says, by helping the driver manage that situation, whether through counseling or other means, and not to punish him. One fleet customer talked with a driver who appeared to be at risk and discovered that his wife of 40 years had died. He kept driving "just to keep his mind off things," but had not come to terms with the death, Jain says. The fleet gave him a week of paid leave. The system also helps fleets in that they "don't have the time or resources to call all drivers every few months or weeks," says Jain. "We're able to help them talk to the right driver at the right time on the right subject." FleetRisk says every one of its customers has seen retention increase. That's true even for those who use only FleetRisk's safety application "because drivers now feel connected," says Jain. When fleets remediate with the 10 percent of drivers most at risk for an accident, those drivers have post-remediation accident rates that are 85 percent lower than what the remaining 90 per- cent of drivers experience, FleetRisk says. The cost is $6 per month per driver for each of the three mod- els: safety, workers comp and retention. CASE STUDY: Averitt Express In its six years of working with FleetRisk, Averitt Express has made big improvements in safety, says David Broyles, operations manager. The Cookeville, Tenn.-based company is using FleetRisk for the 1,300 to 1,400 trucks in its truckload division and the 700 in its dedicated division. In the last three years alone, Averitt's truckload division has seen a 41 percent drop in preventable ac- cidents. The fleet is using only FleetRisk's safety module but has found retention to be a "byproduct" of that effort. With the advent of Qualcomm years ago, Averitt, like many fleets, "quit using the tele- phone like we used to," says Broyles. "You lose that relationship- building with drivers." Now, when the data identifies at-risk drivers in need of remediation, "We're forcing the fleet manager to get back in the VIGILLO'S ATHENA business of talking to drivers on the phone," says Broyles. Averitt started with identifying the 10 percent of drivers most likely to be facing an accident in the near future. As the acci- dent rate dropped for that group, managers began addressing the top 30 percent. Some typical predictors at Averitt have been financial stress, accidents in the past 90 days, and the frequency of working midnight to 5 a.m. in the past two weeks. Broyles says some "curious" predictors also have emerged. Even though the company pays for empty miles, drivers with the most empty miles were the most accident-prone. One big operational change has been getting proactive with fatigue. By measuring the frequency of overnight driving, each driver gets an ongoing fatigue rating. "If the fatigue number goes up, we change their dispatch," Broyles says. Averitt Express is using FleetRisk for the 1,300 to 1,400 trucks in its truckload division and the 700 in its dedicated division. MARKETED AS: Big data EMPHASIS: Safety, efficiency and profitability DATA USED: Broad, ranging from driver-generated and CSA-related to areas such as weather and population density TARGET CUSTOMERS: Fleets of 50-plus trucks A fter getting its jumpstart in 2009 by analyzing informa- tion generated through the CSA program, Vigillo since has created more than two dozen data products. This year it added Athena, which the company describes as its "state-of-the-art big data platform and the answer to the business intelligence chal- lenges facing the trucking industry." In the first week following Athena's February launch after months of customer testing, Vigillo brought on about a dozen carriers representing about 7,000 drivers. The data approach is to "take a holistic view of everything," says Steve Bryan, Vigillo's chief executive officer. "Whether it's onboard vehicle, back office, government – wherever it lurks, we're trying to pull all of it together into one unified analytic predictive platform where we can start to do things with data nobody's done before." That means casting a wide net for data. Historical weather information overlaid on other data can reveal unanticipated patterns involving safety, routing, pricing and other things. Or population data from the U.S. Census: "Where exactly and what kind of freight is going to what kind of people," says Bryan. "Our big goal is to become the hub of all data the industry has," he says. Athena customers receive analytics based on 12 channels of data, including U.S. Census and CSA data.