Monitoring
Just like finance, manufacturing or sales, the organisation needs to monitor and measure fleet safety performance to find out how successful it is.
The organisation needs to know:
• Where they are now.
• Where they want to be.
• What is the difference - and why.
This is where monitoring and reporting comes into play. The fundamental purpose of monitoring is to:
• Monitor performance against targets, and take action to ensure targets are met.
•To diagnose problems, identify risks and design effective improvement programmes accordingly.
• Monitor organisation and individual compliance with standards and procedures, and take action against noncompliance.
• Motivate management and staff to implement and comply with safety targets, standards and procedures.
Monitoring the organisation’s fleet safety performance and feeding the results back into the management reporting system will help to ensure continuous improvement. This will enable your organisation to review the effectiveness of its policies, controls and procedures and to identify areas for improvement. Publicising and explaining trends to managers and staff will help in developing and implementing fleet safety initiatives that you think will tackle the highlighted trends.
There are two key components of monitoring systems:
• Active monitoring, monitoring before things go wrong. It involves regular inspection and checking to ensure that your standards are being implemented and management controls are working. You will answer the question - are you achieving the objectives and standards you set and are they effective?
• Reactive monitoring, monitoring after things go wrong. This involves learning from mistakes and incidents, whether they have resulted in injuries and property damage or near misses.
In each case, the organisation should identify why performance was substandard.
The organisation needs to ensure that information from both active and reactive monitoring is used to identify situations that create risks. Once identified, action must be taken to address the risks, with priority given where risks are greatest. Look closely at serious events and those with potential for serious harm to understand the immediate and the underlying causes of the events then investigate and record what happened to find out why. Refer the information to the people with authority to take action, including organisational and policy changes.
A simple Manual Incident Analysis Form is provided in 'Tools and Resources' which has been adapted from one produced by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA).
As a part of the monitoring process, an organisation needs to agree a set of indicators appropriate to their working practices, taking into account the organisation’s resources and capacity to collect and analyse the required data. The organisation will need to consider the collection, recording and analysis of data from all aspects of the Fleet Safety Management System, including:
• Drivers
• Vehicles
• Journeys
• Incidents
• Audits and compliance reviews
An example of good practice use of Data Sets is included in 'Tools and Resources'.
A note on data collection: while vehicle logbooks with manual entry by drivers are the norm in many organisations, the use of in-vehicle telematics (electronic data capture) systems are increasingly being employed in many fleet operations. These systems provide an organisation with up-to-date information on vehicle use including mileage, average speed, peak speed, journey time, driver breaks, etc. Gathering data manually for a vehicle fleet that is geographically distributed and in-use can be challenging, therefore in-vehicle monitoring systems can provide an effective means of collecting accurate data to manage a vehicle fleet.
Once collected, there are a number of ways of analysing data, either through specific fleet management software, which will have standard management reports built in, or through locally developed spreadsheets.
Case Study
The following case study highlights how the information gathered during incident monitoring can be used to influence fleet safety management through the improvement of driver standards and procedures. The information contained below is taken from a number of reports and presentations, available on the Internet.
Vehicle Incident Monitoring and Improvements, Volvo
To enable Volvo to continually improve its safety performance the company fully investigates all incidents involving its trucks. The main goals are to establish statistics on the numbers and types of truck incidents understand why these incidents happen and analyse how they occur.
The results of such long term incident analysis have shown that:
• 30% of all incidents were caused by road conditions (e.g. pot holes)
• 90% of all incidents were driver related (e.g. fatigue, poor driving behaviour)
• 10% of all incidents were caused by vehicle defects (e.g. tyre deformation, component failure)
In response to these results Volvo has undertaken a range of activities to improve the safety performance if its own truck drivers as well as those drivers from companies using Volvo vehicles.
N.B.These data adds up to more than 100% as some incidents are the result of multiple causes e.g. road conditions and driver behaviour.
