A good risk management program is absolutely critical to the success of any modern fleets – regardless of whether they have company drivers or owner operators. It’s imperative that they do an outstanding job of assessing and managing the risk that is introduced by virtue of all the different activities that drivers must do to get goods from point A to point B.

The reason for an aggressive risk management program is pretty self-evident: our society, as everyone is aware, is extremely litigious, insurance rates are getting out of control. As the economy tightens and fleets look to cut back, employees tend to misbehave because they’re worried about their jobs – with workman’s comp and disability claims go through the roof; so there are a lot of factors in a tumultuous economy that add to the already inherent risk of just driving great big trucks really fast over the roads.

river scorecards of years past would have primarily been a manual record-keeping process done by somebody at the company, where they would be observing the behavior of drivers and then recording certain events that they deem to be of importance.

They would, in an effort to understand driver by driver, how they stack up against the rest of the fleet, they would record things like moving violations, convictions for moving violations, and anything else that they can observe about the way a driver is performing their job.

In more recent years you’ve seen a movement towards integration into many of the in-cab technologies providers; so they are able to monitor in real-time some of those key-performance-indicators (KPIs) that tie directly to driver behavior: over speed events, hard brake events, excess idle time – the things that those units are very good at capturing. You’re now beginning to see those, in more recent years, come out as the driver scorecard that has live feeds of this data that captures about that driver.

Today’s technology is moving towards connecting not just to the information that’s coming from the truck, but to information that comes from a multitude of sources throughout an organization, adding value to the richness of what that scorecard means about the driver.

You have information that comes out of HR systems, out of claims management systems, out of the safety department, out of maintenance or finance – and all of this information can be aggregated with all of that data coming out of the cab to create a real 360 degree view of everything you need to know about the behavior of that driver. This allows a company to make better, more informed judgments about that driver’s relative level of risk, as well as step in and get proactive in the management of that driver, for coaching or discipline – whatever is required to get that driver back to an acceptable performance level.

The benefit of pulling information from your back-office departments is to add to and supplement the information coming from the in-cab device. Maybe you have a driver, who by all indications of how he’s performing behind the wheel is doing a good job – is not speeding, not hard braking, not excess idling – but they may be taking excessive time off, always late, hard on the equipment or often on workman’s comp. So you may find that the driver doing a good job behind the wheel may be a real problem as an employee because of other, non in-cab activities.

Companies implementing these scorecards almost always see a drastic increase in their employee’s performance levels. The old adage, if you can measure it you can manage it, is never clearer than in this case. Once drivers understand what is expected of them, they understand what these factors are that they’re going to be measured upon and then the company can track them – by driver, terminal, region, division, however they’re organized – you see the drivers respond very positively and the managers do a better job of managing the drivers; they now know, in real-time, exactly where these drivers are along this spectrum of risk and can take action at the appropriate time, before an issue becomes something much bigger.

We see over and over again, with companies that are adopting this approach, that it changes the culture of an organization. What they’re seeing is drivers that maybe were originally a little disgruntled or suspicious of these management systems, once they see they’re being measured consistently and repeatedly and that their colleagues are being measured the same way, it really changes the way drivers think about their job, creating a lot more buy-in.

Driver scorecards, especially with these new technologies, allow fleets to get proactive with their drivers, resulting in potentially huge impacts on their bottom line. The return on investment can come from a number of different areas and, quite frankly, is often dependent on how the company decides to structure and weight that scorecard. People will perform in those areas that are clearly communicated to them to be important. So if safety is the number one concern and the scores are based on safety metrics, than you are going to see safety standards go up across the board; if you are focused on fuel usage, you will see fuel performance go up. It all comes down to feedback – both positive and negative – and how people respond to it, and that’s what the scorecards provide.