Abstract
Land transport accidents and driving safety have been widely discussed in industry studies, articles, conferences and meetings. Despite significant investment in driving safety initiatives, an oilfield services company had reached a plateau in its indicators of the severity and number of its automotive accidents. Driving continues to be the activity with the highest associated risk in the company. The same challenge is experienced among the entire oil and gas industry.
The authors believe that preventive programs have, in general, a top-down approach in which drivers are a passive factor—often rather limited in their receipt of instruction and feedback on their driving skills. This paper describes a case study from the Middle East of a project applied to the operations of a global integrated oilfield services company, which aims to set a new level of driving safety performance through a vision: that drivers behave because they believe. A key element for making this vision a reality is the implementation of a centralized Journey Management Center (JMC) with specialist hardware, application software, telecommunications technology, and multilingual staff who manage land transport activities in multiple countries with a diversity of risk environments.
The JMC works hand-in-hand with local management to provide practical risk assessments before a journey starts, track journeys in real time, apply on-time positive and formative interventions, and supply managers with comprehensive reports that they can use to understand the behavior of their drivers, and provide recognition and coaching to them in response to their performance. The system encourages a humanized approach in which drivers feel the company cares about them, and they value the program because they acknowledge it is good for their personal lives.
The case study details major factors for success in terms of process, technology and—most importantly—people. It describes the results, after more than a year of operations, using proactive and lagging indicators. A highlight of these results is a 30% reduction in the frequency and severity of automotive crashes.
