Opinion: ELD Mandate’s Effect on Day-to-Day Operations

By Tony Forrest

Senior Product Manager

Omnitracs

The electronic logging mandate is upon us and can’t be ignored. Although we all have heard about the technical changes the mandate will bring, we haven’t heard as much about the effect it will have on operations.

Many carriers are wondering how the mandate will change their daily operations: Will it be easier or more complicated to conduct daily business? How much training and education will my drivers require?

To answer these questions and understand the level of effect, we have to divide carriers into three groups representative of their status: carriers that already have a comprehensive ELD solution, carriers that have a simple e-log solution untethered to the vehicle and carriers that maintain only paper logs.

Carriers with a comprehensive ELD solution will be the least affected operationally. With such devices in use, they can capitalize on the infrastructure and the operational procedures already in place to support the ELD mandate, and in many cases, the implementation will require just a software update.

However, some carriers may find themselves unprepared for changes that require driver protection from harassment. Also known as the Prohibition of Driver Coercion, which is being advanced in tandem with the ELD mandate, this rule states that carriers, shippers and brokers could face up to $11,000 in civil penalties and up to $250,000 in punitive damages for loss or potential loss of business, or work fines for harassing or pressuring drivers to operate outside of federal safety regulations. The ELD mandate effectively reinforces that the driver is the owner of the record of duty status log. As the owner of the log, the driver is required to have access to all of his or her data at any time.

That also means any changes to the logs have to be either initiated or approved by the driver. Today, many carriers see themselves as the owners of the data, and that mindset needs to change.

Additionally, current ELD users will experience change with the addition of yard moves and personal conveyance as official duty statuses.

Although the use of these two new statuses will not be mandatory, the ELD mandate will provide new levels of standardization, and drivers may need simple training to recognize them. Lastly, carriers that have an ELD solution will be affected by the definition of drive status as it relates to the beginning of trip. Whereas many ELD vendors define driving and the beginning of trip as a series of speed and distance thresholds, the ELD mandate will define driving as anything faster than 5 mph.

Understanding the mandate’s new definitions will require education and implementing some changes at the operational level.

Carriers that use electronic-logging software that does not synchronize with the engine will not be in compliance with the new mandate. Traditionally,

e-log solutions have been applications that run on stand-alone devices such as tablets and phones, and act as paper logs in which a driver manually changes duty status on the application. The ELD mandate will require that the device be tethered to the vehicle, that it collect specific information from the vehicle’s information bus and eliminate any opportunity to inaccurately capture driving information. As a result, e-log solutions will need new hardware components to be compliant.

Having back office and host functionality is not required by the ELD mandate. However, such functionality will be inherent to many of the ELD solutions that fleets adopt. In addition to scheduling maintenance to install the new hardware components, those carriers currently using a stand-alone e-log application may be required to operationally define how it will support a host system and back-office functionality.

One of the advantages that many e-log users will experience when adopting an ELD, is being able to maximize driving time by looking at how precisely time is recorded. Paper logs and e-logs usually show time in increments of 15 minutes, but current ELDs have a granularity of one minute. This allows drivers to reclaim up to seven minutes of non-driving time they may have otherwise lost due to rounding to the nearest 15 minutes. At the end of the year, those seven minutes add up to more miles driven and more revenue earned.

Carriers using paper logs will be the most impacted, but will also have the most to gain. These carriers will be required to implement and install new hardware and software solutions as part of the mandate. Doing so will require that they train drivers to use the new device. It is possible that with such a big transition in processes, they may experience some initial resistance. However, in the long run, these carriers will soon see a number of benefits beyond compliance — a reduction of out-of-service violations from log inaccuracies, the elimination of log violations and the end of missing logs are just a few of the benefits. For a driver accustomed to filling out paper logs, the new ELD mandate may be a hard sell at the beginning, but soon every driver will find the device indispensable.

The new ELD mandate certainly has its own set of challenges, however, it brings far more advantages with it — the most important being a continued growth in the culture of safety.

Dallas-based Omnitracs is the global pioneer of innovative software and SaaS fleet management solutions serving the transportation industry.