Best Fleets Insights: Technology as a magnifying glass

Published on September 23, 2024

From what technology companies tell us, their ‘solutions’ will solve all sorts of problems for companies, right from the comfort of the manager’s computer. But is it true? While tech does offer the possibility of new efficiencies, companies that do well in the Best Fleets to Drive For^® program have discovered something: that tech by itself doesn’t give you answers—it just lets you ask better questions.

Think about the standard approach to solving a problem in your fleet: identify the issue, craft a response, and measure whether or not it worked. Pretty straightforward stuff, but Best Fleets winners take it to the next level.

• Policing vs understanding
• ‘If/then’ vs ‘what if’
• Measuring correction vs impact

You’ve got a brand new dashcam set up and you’re excited to catch all of those near misses and hard-braking incidents so you can improve your safety scores and eventually lower your insurance costs. When it comes to first identifying a problem, a Best Fleet might agree with you, except that they would substitute the word “understand” for the word “catch”. Rather than policing infractions, they’re more interested in figuring out what’s going on underneath the issue. As Michael Lasko of Boyle Transportation (a repeat Best Fleets Hall of Famer) observed: “Sometimes you can find out the root cause is very far removed from what actually happened.”

While technology systems like dashcams (and others) do provide invaluable data, they don’t interpret it. The trick is to be prepared to go deeper into all this new information you’re gathering. Best Fleets have shown us that focusing on granularity allows them to more effectively drill down to root causes.

For your own organization then, once you can manage the more granular pieces of information that are coming in, you can shift from asking questions like “Why are we having so many accidents?” to “What factors are contributing to these incidents and are they different across drivers, time of day, locations, routes, etc.?” Those kinds of questions will let you see if two different incidents that look similar (two different drivers, both with hard braking issues, for example) are actually driven by different causal factors. And being able to ask (and answer) those kinds of questions leads directly into the next trick the Best Fleets have up their sleeves.

If the previous category was about identifying the problem, this one is about responding appropriately, and here again the Best Fleets do things a little differently. Traditional responses to driver events and infractions can take an inflexible, if/then format: if you are caught doing this, then we will do that. If you are caught speeding more than 10mph over the limit, then you are fired. Simple as that. Add in the efficiency of some telematics to flag all of the infractions, and all you need to do is keep pulling the trigger on the set-in-stone response, right?

While there is value in having clear, firm standards and expectations for your team, what if the issue that is driving the problem is more nuanced? What if what’s needed is a response that is sensitive enough to address the details of the situation that aren’t in the data?

In interviews with Best Fleets winners (for example here and here), a critical part of their approach is to keep an eye on the human element. So often, Best Fleets stress the importance of leveraging personal relationships when it comes to understanding the issue and facilitating change. The technology can tell you where to look, but properly targeting your response still requires getting your hands dirty. And that gap points to why technology is a magnifying glass and not a solution in itself, especially for Best Fleets leaders. The data can’t reach all the way down to the human element.

The goal of measuring the change that your solution provided is one that people often talk about—if you're looking to solve a problem, of course you want to check and see if your solution actually addressed it. For example, finding out if the number of harsh braking events that you were responding to went down is crucial, and you can use a tech solution to monitor it (probably the same one that flagged them in the first place). Yet again, Best Fleets companies would agree with you, but take it one step further.

Because nothing in trucking ever happens in a vacuum (and even less so within a given company), a move in one area can have knock-on effects in another area (for more on how Best Fleets handle this, try this article). So even if the data coming in shows that the solution did indeed address the problem, Best Fleets still use other ways of monitoring the wider impacts of their policies and actions. They might ask things like How did that corrective action affect the driver’s subsequent performance? Did it affect his/her overall job satisfaction? Did it affect how other drivers perceive the fairness of the processes? Was there an impact beyond this specific intervention?

Note that you don’t have to ask those kinds of questions to know that you’ve solved the original problem (the driver has indeed lowered his/her incidents of hard braking)—and your data can tell you if that has happened. By taking the extra step though, Best Fleets demonstrate that there is still a whole landscape of factors that can affect the business that are operating just beyond the data.

What’s important to remember is that Best Fleets don’t rely on tech to give them the entire picture—it’s one tool among many in the toolbox, and it’s a tool that helps magnify and clarify the situation so they can make better decisions about what to do next.