Location, hard braking, RPM, fuel economy, oil temperature, speed, acceleration, idle durations, odometer, fault codes, cell phone use, fatigue, tailgating… telematics and dash cameras enable access to a laundry list of information. While this can offer great opportunity to improve operational efficiency and safety, it can also be easy to drown in seas of data, metrics, and analyses. This is especially true for those new to telematics.
In our last post, we talked about some of the issues that can challenge telematics programs and offered some high-level thoughts on how to improve success. In this post, we will explore the benefits of Simplicity.
The wealth of information provided from telematics offers opportunity to solve multiple problems.
In our client portfolio, the fleets and insurers that enjoy the greatest success are those that realize trying to tackle multiple issues at the same time is challenging at best. Traveling multiple paths requires greater resources. A multi-track strategy can also present confounding interdependencies that make it difficult to parse cause and effect.
In our experience, the most successful organizations start simple. Whether they focus on cutting fuel costs or reducing collisions, they pick one or a few items to focus on and complete those before trying to address other challenges.
In the spirit of safety first, let’s consider this idea of simplicity through the lens of trying to reduce the cost of accidents.
One avenue would be to leverage multiple metrics (braking, acceleration, tailgating, distraction, etc.). It can easily and intuitively be accepted that all of these types of things have a bearing on the frequency and severity of accidents.
So, it would seem logical to try and address all of them via an aggregate driver score or something similar. Is this logic flawed?
Consider the following conversation between driver and supervisor:
Supervisor: “As you know, we want you to keep your score under 5. Your score this week was 8. This was caused by 4 hard brake events, 2 rapid acceleration incidents, and 5 speeding violations.
Driver: “When and where did all of these happen? How do each of these impact my score? What should I focus on first? How do I keep track of all of this while trying to do my job?”
Understanding that this approach could be overwhelming and a bit confusing, what if we pare things back to just focus on hard braking and add a little more specificity?
Supervisor: “You had a hard brake event Tuesday at 2 PM on Main Street”
Driver: “What is a hard brake event?”
Supervisor: “You decelerated by 14 MPH in 1.5 seconds.”
Driver: “How many MPH am I allowed to decelerate in how many seconds?”
Supervisor: “Ummmm….Errrrr”
Driver: “By the way, someone cut in front of me. Did you want me to hit them?”
What if we instead start by focusing on speeding alone?
Supervisor: “You were driving 39 MPH in a 25 MPH zone on Main Street at 2 PM on Tuesday”.
Driver: “Understood. I will be more aware going forward.”
The singular use of speeding to drive improvement is an example of how taking the simple path can have an impact in wider dimensions. A recent meta-analysis performed by Don Grimm, FCAS, “An Analysis of the Speed-Severity Relationship in a Typical Auto Accident” demonstrates the favorable financial impact that speed reduction can have on accident severity:
Maybe not coincidently, in our client portfolio, we see an 80% to 90% correlation between speed reduction and reduction of other aggressive driving behavior, depending on class of business.
Ultimately, the best means of maximizing impact from telematics will vary based upon the nature of a company’s business, but getting to the desired destination does not require a complicated route. Keeping things simple – both in terms of the number of elements considered and their intuitiveness – is often the best path to realizing greater impact, more easily and more rapidly.
