Organizations that use a fleet of vehicles to conduct business face a growing set of concerns and exposures from a competitive standpoint, as well as rising insurance rates. Fleets of all sizes and compositions are affected, from truckload and private carriers to utility trucks and passenger vehicles. Organizations must evaluate their operations and safety programs in order to drive improvements and create a roadmap toward successful, sustained operations. Benchmarking fleet safety operations is a valuable tool in this process.
Fleet benchmarking is a systematic review of an organization's current fleet safety management controls measured against industry best practices. Some of the more common benchmarking measures that an organization may use to evaluate a fleet safety program are:
Accidents per million miles / route days per collision
Crashes per 100 vehicles
Miles per gallon
Revenue per unit
Employee injuries and lost-time ratios
While these quantitative measures are fairly easy to calculate and are important, they can only be determined after an incident has occurred. This means that management can only react after a problem begins to surface through losses or other measures. These results-based standards, while significant, are limited in application and scope due to the fact that they do not allow an organization to proactively address concerns. Ranking program components and assigning a numerical score to a broad range of safety controls, beyond basic, reactive measurements, presents some unique challenges.
Benchmarking a company's safety management effort offers the opportunity to evaluate its controls in a proactive manner. Safety activities should be evaluated against best practices in the industry for a wide array of categories. The controls should be evaluated as activity-based standards as part of a broader benchmarking effort and used to positively impact safety results. Experience and research studies have shown that by implementing the appropriate safety controls an organization will experience fewer losses and greater efficiencies.
By utilizing a best practice approach, the challenge of applying a scoring model to qualitative measures can be addressed. Achieving a best practice rating in any area will yield the highest score. Efforts that fall short of best practice status will be ranked according to the contributions they do make toward achieving best practice status. Resulting gaps clearly represent opportunities for the organization to make improvements.
Benchmarking an organization's fleet safety management efforts provides an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of a program. By benchmarking current safety programs, management can gain a clear understanding of what is working and what needs to be improved. The organization will derive the greatest benefit from the benchmarking study if the results are used throughout the safety program.
Weaknesses in the current programs can be gauged against industry best practices in any area of operation. When program deficiencies are noted, it creates an opportunity for management to institute changes in current practices.
