This week we start a new short series of blog posts on the ongoing and serious issue of driver fatigue.

1. The Problem:

As you go through your work day notice the folks nodding off on the bus, the co-worker snoozing with heavy lids during a meeting, the people lined up at the coffee shop for their much needed mid-afternoon caffeine injection. Like them, but at increased risk of catastrophic injury, are the employees who are just as sleepy but are behind the wheel of a vehicle.

* Note to employers – when Driving Fatigue may affect a person’s ability to drive safely it must be identified, assessed and controlled like any other life threatening hazard in the workplace.

Continue reading →

The recent increase in fuel costs has had significant impact on fleet operations, and most fleet leaders see more trouble ahead. These are just two of the insights we announced today from a recent GreenRoad Fleet Leader survey exploring fuel costs and measurement.

Overall, we found that 71% of fleets have been significantly impacted by rising fuel costs, and 92% of fleet leaders expect costs to continue rising. Fifty-eight percent (58%) expect additional significant increases in fuel costs.

The most surprising data is around driver performance management. Although research has shown that driver behaviour, i.e., speeding, harsh braking and acceleration, and idling, are key contributors to increased fuel use, only one-third of fleet leaders surveyed measure fuel consumption by driver.

Continue reading →

1o.       Insufficient resources

And finally, given steps 1-9, it should be apparent that adequate resources from all participants needs to be planned for. The one resource that is critical and is sometimes not included are the drivers. A representative driver, a driver committee, the driver union, needs to be a critical participant in the process. Driver buy-in to the program, the benefits, will be a critical success factor.

I hope you’ve found this series useful.  Next week, I will be back with a piece on driver fatigue.

Click here to view the previous post from this chain. 

A few days ago we released our first annual GreenRoad Worldwide Fleet Driver Performance Benchmark Report. That’s quite a mouthful and might lead one to ask, “Why does driver performance data matter”? 

At GreenRoad, through our in-vehicle technology, we automatically gather a large set of fleet driver data. We measure driving events across five major categories: braking, acceleration, corner handling, lane handling and speeding. In 2011 alone, this data set represents 85,000 drivers who logged 127 million trips and 7.4 billion miles across North America and UK in 2011.

Continue reading →

9.  Unrealistic timelines and deadlines

When considering the project goals, metrics and measurements – make sure the business cycle supports the expected change. For  example if through high performance driving we expect to replace fewer tires and have fewer brake maintenance transactions (or other routine or catastrophic transactions) a complete maintenance lifecycle against control data needs to be evaluated – and this particular metric may take a year, or longer, depending on year make an model.  Installation of technology needs to be considered in the project timeline. The upfront design of the program (steps 1,2,4,6,7) need sufficient time before the installation project begins.

Click here to view the previous post from this chain.

GreenRoad were privileged to sponsor a round table attended by the nominees for the prestigious Fleet News Awards 2012 on Wednesday. The event was a forum for discussing key challenges – and solutions that fleets in the UK are faced with and the attendees represented a cross section of public and private sector fleets, small and large, commercial and ‘perk’ vehicles and grey fleet.  They included representatives from GE Capital, North Yorkshire Police, Intercontinental Hotel Group, AAH Pharmaceuticals, Arval, Menzies Distribution and IBM among others.  

It turned out to be a very interesting event! What were some of the most compelling discussions and conclusions?

Continue reading →

When I joined GreenRoad more than a year ago I was struck by the profound changes impacting the fleet industry. Telematics, a twenty-year old technology, was rapidly being displaced by new, modern web-based SaaS solutions, such as GreenRoad. Fleet owners and operators were looking for and embracing mobility through their use of smartphones and iPads.

On Tuesday, we released the results of a Fleet Leaders survey that confirms these observations and further illustrates the transformation we call “Connected Fleet”.  As the Fleet Leaders in our survey indicate, a majority (57%) have already tossed aside standalone PC-based software solutions for web-based software, 28 percent are actively using smartphones for fleet management related tasks and 8% are using iPads or other tablets.

Continue reading →