iTECH: What’s Your Safety Score?

By Mindy Long, Contributing Writer

This article appears in the June/July issue of iTECH, published in the June 14 print edition of Transport Topics. Click here to subscribe today.

Mitch Henderson has monitored for years how his drivers perform behind the wheel but realized only recently that two drivers in particular were responsible for most of the fleet’s roadside inspections.

“It throws up a red flag, and you wonder what these guys are doing differently to cue the inspectors,” said Henderson, manager of fleet safety and compliance for Advanced Design & Packaging in Atlanta.

Henderson made the discovery with the help of J.J. Keller & Associates’ online FleetMentor tool, which calculates carriers’ federal safety scores based on roadside inspection reports.

“It shows any problem areas and problem drivers,” Henderson said. Advanced Design & Packaging operates 15 tractors.

Because of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s new safety enforcement program, Comprehensive Safety Analysis, or CSA 2010, driver behavior has become more important for everyone who hauls freight.

The 2010 tag already is out of date, however, because FMCSA has acknowledged the program will not be in place nationwide until 2011.

Still, CSA represents a major change in understanding and measuring safety performance. Carriers will be scored monthly in seven Behavioral Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories, or BASICs: unsafe driving, fatigued driving, driver fitness, alcohol and drugs, vehicle maintenance, cargo securement and crash history. The actions of individual drivers will directly affect their carriers’ scores.

That is where driver scorecards come in.

With the help of third-party scorecard providers, some carriers are getting a sneak peek at what FMCSA sees. The scorecards show which drivers are receiving the most inspections and specific violations that are affecting the fleet.

Scorecards compile a carrier’s roadside inspection data using CSA’s scoring methodology. The scorecards present the results so that managers can follow trends and conduct specific searches with the click of a mouse.

“There are about 3,500 different violations that can be written up on the truck and driver,” said Steven Bryan, chief executive officer of scorecard provider Vigillo LLC, Portland, Ore. “Each of those is weighted by time and severity and assigned to one of the seven BASICs.”

Addressing violations now may lower a carriers’ score later, the vendors say.

All violations have a time factor, which multiplies a violation’s initial score by up to three times, depending on how recent the violation is. The more recent it is, the more it counts against the fleet.

Through the scorecard that Vigillo supplied, Schneider National, Green Bay, Wis., learned that trailer tire violations were leading to a higher score.

“When you look at the CSA 2010 points that we generate, it is disproportionately high on trailer tires,” said Don Osterberg, vice president of safety and driver training for Schneider.

Under the old safety standards, trailer tire violations didn’t often lead to an out-of-service order. Because CSA  scores all violations, including “non-out-of service,” tire problems came into focus “in a much clearer way,” Osterberg said.

Tire violations will be weighted for severity under CSA 2010, and this process has prompted Schneider to change the pull point for its trailer tires to minimize the risk of any violations.

Trimac Transportation Services, a bulk carrier headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, has captured roadside inspection data for the past 10 years, looking for trends, but Neil Voorhees, Trimac’s U.S. director of safety and security in Houston, said a scorecard program allows him to drill down in the data by equipment and driver as never before.

He particularly likes the color-coded U.S. map, offered by Vigillo, which shows which state is enforcing certain BASICs the most.

As Vigillo’s Bryan said, “Some states care about speeding, while some seem to care more about fatigued driving.”

Voorhees told iTECH that he sends spreadsheets to all of Trimac’s branches so managers can examine the drivers and units with the worst violations.

One of Trimac’s branches was receiving a high number of violations for air hoses that were touching, which could cause chafing and leakage of pressure.

“Now our shops and wash racks are making sure they’re putting spreaders in to make sure the air hoses are not touching,” Voorhees said. “It really is important that you identify trends not only to the drivers but to the mechanics and the wash rack personnel so they can be part of the solution also.”

Vigillo’s analysis of CSA 2010 data on more than 400,000 drivers and 1,000 carriers shows that most violations are caused by issues drivers can control, such as speeding and observable defects, including problems with lights, tires and cargo securement.

That is why targeted training of drivers, mechanics and shippers can be especially helpful.

“Carriers who maintain a constant pulse on driver behavior and execute immediate consequences are best positioned to mitigate their risk through fewer safety incidents,” said Cindy Nelson, vice president of marketing and business development for scorecard provider EBE Technologies Inc., East Moline, Ill.

Trimac’s Voorhees said he expects to see savings from reduced fines but the real value is in tailored coaching so the carrier can improve driver retention.

“If we have to terminate a driver, that is $6,000 to $7,000 we let go,” Voorhees said. “Then, we have to spend $6,000 to $7,000 to bring another driver in.”

At Advanced Design & Packaging, Henderson said he plans to work with the two drivers who are triggering the most inspections. He also will use the Keller program to track customer information.

“If I’m having problems with one specific customer that is delaying drivers and making it so they can’t finish their runs within [hours of service limits], we can address it with them,” Henderson said.

The amount of work for a carrier to use a third-party scoring system varies by company.

Carriers must manually enter fleet information and roadside inspection data into J.J. Keller’s FleetMentor. After they enter the data, carriers can generate various reports, including by driver or by regulatory area. FleetMentor costs $795 per year.

J.J. Keller, Neenah, Wis., expects to release its CSA Management Suite in June. The online tool will interface automatically with FMCSA data and allow carriers to manage inspection data and follow up on corrective actions. The program also will help carriers prepare for DOT audits.

“It takes the data out of the safety measurement system and uses the same criteria the DOT uses to select which drivers’ records will be checked during an audit,” said Joel Williams, product development manager for J.J. Keller.

Carriers using Vigillo do not need to enter their information manually; they simply authorize the software provider to access their DOT records.

Vigillo subscribers access data through a secure website and can run any of 30 reports.

“There is an individual scorecard showing one driver and his violations; there is a master report. They can run reports by each BASIC category, by driver and by route,” Bryan said.

Vigillo released its CSA driver scorecard in October and had grown from 50 users then to 1,200 as of mid-April. Vigillo’s scorecard is available by monthly subscription and costs 50 cents per driver per month.

Vigillo’s plan is to tap into more databases out there and lay the data on top of CSA.

“If you can get the speeding data out of an onboard device, you may begin to see who your speeders are long before they rack up on the score,” Bryan said.

Eric Witty, a business analyst for electronic onboard recorder provider Xata Corp., Eden Prairie, Minn., said data from onboard devices gives carriers more understanding of driver behavior and potential violations. Xata doesn’t offer any CSA-specific products but said the program is leading to more awareness of the information its devices can provide.

“The device is connected to the vehicle and the operations there, as well as a GPS tracking capability,” he said.

EBE Technologies offers a Web-based CSA 2010 dashboard as part of its driver management software, Shipping & Hauling Image Processing Solution. The dashboard monitors the reported FMCSA information daily, calculates the defined points for the seven BASIC categories and then enters the results into the carriers’ driver scorecard.

Carriers can run a driver summary that lists drivers by first name, last name, inspection count, violation count, score and percentile for each BASIC category. Carriers also can view the time and severity weight of violations.

One of the values associated with the third-party providers is the ability for carriers to validate their own driver records with inspection information on the FMCSA website.

EBE’s program compares FMCSA’s violation information — such as the driver’s name, driver’s license number and the state that issued the license — with the carrier’s driver files. “We see a lot of mistakes,” Nelson said. “There is a high degree of error with a police officer entering information wrong.”

EBE’s system creates a mismatch driver queue. Carriers can search for a list of potential matches for an inspection report. If a match is found, the driver’s name falls out of the queue. If no match is found, EBE can link automatically with FMCSA’s website to appeal an inspection report and will track the response.

Trimac’s Voorhees said inaccurate inspection data are not new, but in the past, it wasn’t worth the time to correct the information. With every violation adding up under CSA 2010, correcting errors has taken on new importance.

“Now we’re going to have to spend a lot more time and manpower to fight the things that are not accurate,” Voorhees said, noting that he found several errors on Trimac’s inspection information the first time he logged in.

A carrier’s score lets the company know where it stands with CSA, but it does not indicate if the carrier will be subject to DOT intervention. Carrier scores are ranked relative to all others in a peer group to help authorities see which carriers have specific safety problems.

Vigillo also uses complex statistical analyses to show carriers where they will rank with the other members of their peer group and how likely an intervention is.

“It doesn’t do you any good to know your basic measures unless you know where you rank in relation to your peer group,” Bryan said.

To produce the calculations, Vigillo downloaded the publicly available data and scoured the information it could find on tens of thousands of carriers to help determine peer rankings.

“Now we can do an analysis and a statistical projection,” Bryan said. “We can project where we believe everybody will be under a CSA 2010 projection.” Vigillo has worked with its customers in the nine FMCSA pilot states, he added.

J.J. Keller doesn’t compare carriers to their peers and makes no assumptions about which carriers will be subject to intervention.

“Instead of basing a sample number on small statistics, we wanted to wait until we could get a good number,” said Jacqueline Jurmu, Internet product design manager at J.J. Keller.

Jurmu said J.J. Keller expects more information on percentages to be available from DOT in August and plans to collaborate with carriers then to begin examining percentile rankings.

EBE also is working to provide carriers with a percentile in addition to a score, Nelson said, and expects to release the feature later this year.

EBE, Vigillo and J.J. Keller offer carriers no guarantees that their scores are accurate.

“If we were wildly off and misleading our customers, they wouldn’t use us,” Vigillo’s Bryan said, however.

Candice Tolliver, FMCSA’s director of communications, said the agency does not endorse private companies’ offering CSA preparations and cannot speak to the validity of their products.

It doesn’t take a vendor’s scorecard to know what is going on. Managers may examine the safety performance data that FMCSA has collected about their carriers via FMCSA’s online CSA 2010 Data Review, which opened online April 12. Carriers can view the information by visiting http://csa2010.fmcsa.dot.gov and entering their DOT number and Personal Identification Number.