Tracking driver behaviour to meet health and safety requirements

By Chris L’ecluse, solution specialist, Teletrac Navman. Called the biggest change in health and safety laws in more than 20 years, the Health and Safety at Work Act is nearly upon us. Monday April 4 2016 marks the day that the Act comes into force. More will be expected of owners and managers of businesses around the country, but tracking technology can play a big part in better monitoring and managing health and safety. A lot has been written about the new Act, but let’s recap on the key changes: Under the new laws, individual people (not just companies) will be held responsible. Directors or officers have a primary duty of care to ensure the health and safety of workers and others. They must exercise due diligence to ensure that the organisation complies with that duty. Workers also will have a duty to take reasonable care for their own health and safety and ensure that their actions do not affect the health and safety of others. How to respond? Mitigating risk is key. For businesses where driving is an intrinsic part of everyday business, GPS fleet tracking systems offer a holistic approach to safety. They do this through tracking individual vehicles and their hours of use, as well as monitoring driver behaviour such as harsh acceleration, harsh braking, excessive idling, harsh cornering and impact detection. This provides huge amounts of data which are converted into intelligence to provide firms with solutions for improving the safety of their personnel. For example, a fleet tracking system can show where drivers are with pinpoint accuracy. The system can also be configured to alert the owner or manager if a driver doesn’t return to base by a designated curfew. Similarly, an alert can be issued if a certain time has elapsed without a vehicle being used, indicating that there may be a problem. With the ability to show driver and vehicle behaviour in real time, GPS tracking software, such as Teletrac Navman Director, helps managers to promote better driver behaviour within company vehicle fleets. Things such as visual event viewers and driver scorecards allow businesses to monitor and replay unsafe driving events that occur on the road, and then create reports that summarise unsafe road behaviour. Some software also allows companies to do side-byside driver rankings, enabling a bit of healthy competition between drivers to improve their driving safety! Once you’ve identified poor driving behaviour, you can arrange a specific training regime to suit each driver’s behaviour. Again technology can help. Online driver training programmes, such as the Teletrac Navman Driving Academy, are designed to help companies reduce collisions, injuries, costs and liabilities for fleets and create extra visibility in identifying the drivers most at risk. The programme allows managers to identify risk in core areas such as scanning, space management, knowledge of danger zones, speed management, and awareness of other vehicles, then provide appropriate training to improve driver responses. A fleet tracking system gives real-time visibility of all the vehicles being used, and provides data on driver behaviour to inform personalised training programmes to upskill workers. This means that both company directors/owners and workers are well placed to meet the new legislative requirements by taking greater responsibility for health and safety. - Navman Wireless and Teletrac are combined to represent global leadership in Gps-based fleet optimisation products and services, including real-time vehicle tracking and analytics that enable companies to monitor, measure and improve driver safety, operational costs and efficiencies. The joint company’s technology currently tracks more than 500,000 vehicles across five continents, making it one of the world’s largest fleet management software providers. The company, headquartered in Glenview, Illinois, has offices in the United States, Mexico, Europe, New Zealand and Australia. More details at www. navmanwireless.co.nz and www.teletrac.com