Overdrive Magazine | Trucking Business News & Owner Operator Info
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/339482
44 | Overdrive | July 2014 carriers' crystal ball J ohn Christner Trucking this year began using Athena, a product Vigillo calls its "state-of-the-art big data platform and the answer to the business intelligence challenges facing the trucking industry." Vigillo has been the industry's leader in gathering and reselling data from the federal Compliance, Safety, Accountability program. It appears to be "a pretty incredible product," says Shannon Crowley, vice presi- dent of risk management for John Christner, an all-own- er-operator fleet based in Sapulpa, Okla. One of the biggest uses for the fleet might be the ability to educate its customers about the inevitable problems with CSA alerts, he says. Athena can help the fleet craft a periodic report about points dropping off or coming on, and help alleviate customer concerns when scores are too high. Having more detailed and current violation data should be able to help with retention, Crowley says. "If you start to see that, and if you can be proactive and intervene with folks before there are patterns of violation you can't ignore and have to terminate leases over, that's a retention tool." Athena's data also should prove effective in various oper- ations areas, he says. Lanes that have more inspection stations experience prolonged delivery times, so the fleet might adjust pricing accordingly. John Christner expanded its data-crunching in late 2013 when it began using a FleetRisk Advisors retention module, says Crowley, who sees that as more of a pure predictive analytics tool. Ath- ena "is less about modeling and more about putting data in a format and comparing the data and analyzing the data any way you want," he says. In the first week following Athena's February launch, after months of customer testing, Vigillo brought on about a doz- en carriers representing about 7,000 drivers as Athena clients. Athena "takes a holistic view of everything," says Steve Bryan, Vigillo chief executive officer. "Whether it's onboard vehicle, back office, govern- ment – wherever it lurks, we're trying to pull all of it together into one unified analytic pre- dictive platform." Historical weather data, 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," Bryan says. "Our big goal is to become the hub of all data the industry has." While Athena's primary focus is safety, its website says it offers "about 30 highly customizable dashboards for effectively managing safety, operations, sales, mainte- nance, fuel purchasing, and driver recruiting and reten- tion, among others." It's reasonable to expect that some thorny issues will develop as carriers apply more predictive models to their recruiting and retention, especially in the pre-hire stage, but such problems are "well understood by HR de- partments," he says. "This is where the world's going – to a more data-driven deci- sion-making process." John Christner Trucking uses Athena, a new product from Vigillo, the industry's leader in CSA data analysis. Athena uses a broad range of data, from driver-generated and CSA-related to information from areas such as weather reports and population density statis- tics. It emphasizes improving safety, efficiency and profitability. It targets fleets of 50-plus trucks. John Christner Trucking gains from 'big data' solution is to decrease the stress, Jain says, by helping the driver "manage that situ- ation" – whether through counseling or other means – and not to punish him. A fleet customer talked with a driver who appeared to be at risk and discovered that his wife of more than 30 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 or two of paid leave. Every one of FleetRisk's customers has seen retention increase. When fleets reme- diate 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 percent of drivers experience, Jain says. Predictive_Analytics_0714.indd 44 6/26/14 9:51 PM