Focus on driver safety, not tracking, has been shown to reduce accident rates to .22 per million miles driven.

It is an established yet startling fact that the most life-threatening job in the nation is a truck driver. According to the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), individuals involved in trucking suffered more fatalities than those in any other occupation. These fatalities accounted for 12% of all worker deaths. Truck drivers also received more non-fatal injuries than any other occupation.

Oil and gas companies use large fleets of onsite and over-the-road vehicles. For these companies, maintaining the highest standards of safety is of paramount importance. Few if any industries are as safety conscious as oil and gas. In this industry, protecting individual employee wellbeing is not the only concern — accidents and spills can have harmful even disastrous environmental implications.

Great strides have been made to implement safety measures and enhance training, which is particularly important in oil and gas, where operators must drive vehicles in harsh weather, varying terrain conditions, and remote areas. These circumstances are coupled with the often unique characteristics of vehicles and rigs that require the driver to employ different attitudes and driving habits than drivers in other industries and environments.

Is tracking and training enough?

Oil and gas drivers are among the most highly skilled and trained in the industry; however, the “Large Truck Crash Causation Study” commissioned by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) shows that drivers of large trucks, across all industries, are 10 times more likely to be the cause of a crash with other vehicles involved than any other factor such as weather, road conditions, and vehicle performance.

The study was commissioned by FMCSA to review the causes of, and contributing factors to, crashes involving commercial motor vehicles. This study was the first nationwide examination of all pre-crash factors. The conclusion of the administrator was: “This study makes it clear that we need to spend more time addressing driver behavior.”

Strict federal transportation regulations and even stricter corporate safety rules and regulations are pushed on a daily basis to raise the bar. Instituting rules requires a method of measuring results. With an increased focus on metrics, technology has been implemented to keep track of what driving characteristics can be monitored and measured.
In this industry, much of the technology employed to monitor drivers for safety issues has been just that, technology used to monitor drivers. Traditional fleet management solutions allow a company to better manage their vehicles with GPS and other technologies to globally track the happenings of the fleet from staying on the assigned route to whether a door is open or closed. This has a double benefit: the company knows where the vehicles are, and at the same time the drivers know they are being tracked so they will be more inclined to follow the prescribed route.

The goal is to help ensure driver performance and to increase efficiency across the organization.

Companies usually chose either a passive or, more recently, active fleet management system. Passive fleet tracking relies on GPS to know where a vehicle has been. Passive systems tend to be after-the-fact; the information is usually downloaded from the vehicle following a trek and analyzed at a later date. Active fleet tracking can often provide a much richer set of data and is delivered via cell or satellite uplinks in real time.

Conventional fleet management technologies were used to obtain a “driver profile,” which was used to determine either the best drivers for certain vehicles or conditions or leveraged to follow up with the drivers for additional training courses or sometimes even reprimands in an effort to curb accidents.
This methodology is one that is gilded with good intentions, but it is simply not enough to change the behavior of drivers.

New approach to safety

A holistic, comprehensive approach to fleet management centered on improving driver safety can have more far-reaching benefits than traditional fleet management that works to lower operating costs-per-mile, improve productivity, reduce fuel consumption, and lower maintenance costs. These are important objectives to any organization, but a fortunate consequence is that they can all be a by-product of a fleet management system that focuses on driver safety first.

Inthinc, a company that is focused on improving both driver safety and efficiency, has developed a technology called waySmart. This technology has been proven to change the behavior of drivers in the oil and gas industry with remarkable results. It doesn’t do this by the traditional/passive method of relying simply on a vehicle tracking system.
The waySmart device provides specific real-time, in-cab alerts to drivers warning them the instant they commit unsafe or dangerous maneuvers such as making an aggressive turn, speeding excessively, or not buckling a seatbelt. The alerts prompt them to change unsafe behavior on the spot. If the driver does not correct the behavior, a message is sent instantly to management via email or text message and is included in the activity reports. This advanced technological approach has led to dramatic results. It transforms “B-level” drivers into “A-level” drivers overnight and brings down accident rates to unprecedented low levels.

Oil and gas companies using the waySmart system have logged more than 150 million miles (240 million km) in the past year. The accident rate has been substantially reduced, resulting in a rate that equates to an approximate 85% improvement over the average accident rate as calculated by the FMCSA. The reduction of accidents positively impacts the wellbeing of the employees, but it affects the bottom line as well. The avoidance of accidents saves about US $240,000 per million miles.
Leveraging a comprehensive technology that focuses on driver safety and incorporates fleet management programs, asset protection, automated compliance, and reporting does more than bolster the bottom line — it helps organizations bring their workers home safely to their families.