How to Leverage Telematics Gamification to Drive Meaningful Results

Hello, everyone. Vehicle telematics systems have advanced significantly since their debut nearly forty years ago.

Advances in technology such as improved GPS accuracy, expanded wireless coverage, and faster wireless data speeds have turned telematics into powerful management tools.

On behalf of McGriff, I would like to take this opportunity to thank each of you for joining us today as we discuss how to leverage telematics gamification to drive meaningful results. My name is Lasagna Wilder, and I will be your host for the call today. There are just a couple of housekeeping points that I would like to share with you before we get started. This is a live session, and you are in listen mode only.

If you have any questions at any time during the presentation, feel free to utilize the chat box or q and a box to type in your questions, and we will address them during the q and a segment. If time doesn't permit us to answer the questions after the presentation, we will be sure to capture them and provide the responses afterwards. Now it brings me great pleasure to introduce our speaker for the hour, our very own Casey Blackfort, vice president and risk control consultant with McGriff. Casey began his professional career working for the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety, retiring in twenty eleven as the commercial driver license program director after twenty two years of state service.

Since twenty eleven, he has worked with insurance carriers and the oil and gas service industry in key leadership positions managing e h EHS, risk and transportation safety programs. Casey joined McGriff in twenty twenty one and brings extensive knowledge of fleet safety programs, best practices, OSHA compliance, and managing employee behaviors. He provides risk management consultations as a value added services for the McGriff Construction and Energy Group clients and attends client insurance surveys to assist with the interface between prospective clients, existing clients, and insurance carriers.

He also assists McGriff producers with technical inquiries related to safety and regulatory requirements. Casey is a member of the American Society of Safety Professionals, and he serves on the crash investigations, driver traffic enforcement, and hazardous materials committees for the Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance. His areas of expertise includes working knowledge of OSHA regulations and many consistent standards relating to the employee health and safety, strong working knowledge of FMCSRs and the compliance safety and accountability methodologies, experience in deploying and management fleet IoT systems with AI technology, proven effective in modifying or eliminating undesired employee behaviors, hands on experience in managing employee health and safety programs.

And some of his notable achievements includes implementing sustainable initiatives to reduce preventative vehicle crashes by more than fifty percent.

And he's also developed successful strategies to reduce employee injuries and incidents. So without further ado, I would turn it over to Casey to kick off the session.

Well, thank you for that, Lasagna, and welcome everyone. Good afternoon, I guess in some locations. Good morning in others. So we're going to talk about telematics today. It's a main event. I am I'm set the table though with a a few other items to some compelling arguments relating to, you know, the adoption of a of a telematics scorecard program. That include some of the insurance market trends, reducing risk, regulatory compliance piece, and then we'll get into the telematics piece and then talk about some of those successes with that.

So moving into the insurance piece. This is the state of the market, and I think everyone probably on this call identifies with this.

The the red line represents one hundred percent on a insurance carriers making money on on premiums received. And so if you look at that over the past ten years from twenty fourteen until twenty twenty four, the insurance industry in general for auto liability has has been in the losing column for all those years. And so, you know, the response to that is to chase chase the dollars with premium, so increasing premiums, which is you see that light blue line where it's steadily increasing and it's rapidly increasing the last few years. And that's where what he's identifying on this call is that, you know, why is our premiums increases increasing so much? And and here it is. And it's it's the response of the industry carrier interest carriers to try to recoup some of those losses in the auto liability insurance products.

So so, Casey, I hate to jump in, but I think we need to go to the next slide because we're not seeing that graph. There we go.

There we go. Thank you for that. Uh-huh. Little technical difficulty. So there's the red line that you see.

That's the hundred percent. That's called the combined ratio. And so you see the combined ratio exceeding that hundred percent every year over the past ten. And so the again, the response to that is is chasing the the the premium increasing premiums to try to to correct that and still to no avail.

So, you know, some of the contributing factors for those those increases in premiums and the fact that the carriers are are not making a lot of money at all in in auto liability, You know, you look at the factors, vehicle repairs, obviously, with, you know, the the advanced technologies in vehicles, there's radar sensors, there's more infotainment systems. It's just cost more money to to replace a vehicle and repair a vehicle. You know, you've got shortages in in supply chain supply chain disruptions and then so and, of course, the cost of of replacing the equipment. And then, of course, you got medical cost.

And then there's the the threat of nuclear verdicts, which is we're gonna cover some of that in just a minute. Nuclear verdicts then, beget higher claim settlements for fear of of a specific claim going into nuclear verdicts, then insurance carriers are are more quickly to settle claims for higher dollar amounts. So those are the contributing factors for for the the increase in the the, insurance losses. So nuclear verdicts are are not too new, but relatively new. And so they, you know, they've originally coined the phrase nuclear verdict is is anything any any verdict that exceeds ten million dollars.

And and it's not been that long ago that those that those high verdicts like that really started breaching the ten million mark. And and nowadays, they're exceeding ten million dollars. And so some some folks have have kinda changed their mindset. Is it ten million? Is it you know, what's the dollar amount? But but more appropriately, it's verdicts that may be disproportionate to the underlying cause of the crash or maybe they exceed the reasonable cost compensation resulting from a crash. So that's that's where we're at with nuclear verdicts.

And so looking at those from from two thousand ten to two thousand eighteen, this is from Atri, one thousand percent increase in nuclear verdicts from in those eight years. The average verdict went from two point three million to twenty two point three million dollars. And then, of course, in Florida, Mark Carrier surpassed the one billion mark in twenty twenty two with a a catastrophic crash and and a nuclear verdict that that came from that. And one thing it that that in these nuclear verdicts were they're so high, there's one thing that's commonly involved in in those in that litigation.

It's it's a plaintiff strategy called the reptile theory, reptile theory tactic. And what that does is the plaintiff bar is playing on the the psychological emotions of jurors, and they set out to stoke fear, maybe anger the jury. They exploit anything that that the company, the defendant, did or didn't do to contribute to that crash. And so they dig up many, many things relating to the company.

They do FOIA requests with with the government. They get all the documents, all the compliance documents from FMCSA throughout the history of the company.

And so then they start digging out regulatory compliance gaps. They find things that they're gonna make hay out of in in a deposition and then ultimately in front of a jury. And that's what they're doing.

And so they they relate to the jury box that they are the conscience of the community. And so they they really evoke a mentality for that jury to send a message to that to that company.

And that's where these things are going, how they're how they're happening now.

So you get these every year, the American Tort Reform Foundation publishes the judicial households. And this is a moving target. It moves around every year. But this happens to be the top ten locations for judicial what they call judicial hell holes, and that's where these nuclear verdicts are are very prevalent.

But this is not all of them. They're happening all over the place, And it's got to do with the the judges involved in the cases allowing admissive admissibility of evidence that other judges might not, which is those things like per previous performance, carrier performance, driver qualification files, things like that that are that are becoming in play. And these jurisdictions, these venues happen to be the the worst of the worst at this point in time.

So in all these cases, they they frame a case up. A plaintiff bar will frame a case up based on these standards of care, and they're at the heart of most all truck crash lawsuits.

Any and and by defining truck crash, I know we've got a blended audience here of pure trucking companies. We've got vocations. We've got power line contractors, oil and gas contractors. So in every case, the common theme is that most all of them are regulated by FMCSA.

And so these are at the heart of of those of those claims. And so the standard of of care is an enforcement legal standard requiring companies to act toward others and the public with watchfulness, attention, caution, and prudence that a reasonable person in the circumstance would use. And so where this goes into is standards of care are framed up by the FMCSA regulations, state traffic laws, industry best practices such as defensive driving, vehicle inspections, driver monitoring, and then, of course, company policies. And that's where company policies come in important that we don't over policy.

We we we we have to adhere to our policies. So we wanna make sure that policy is set right to that we can live within it. And so those become the standards of care, these are always used in these in these litigation cases.

So reducing risk, how do how do we kinda counter these things?

We obviously, we wanna hire and retain talent with the KSAs. These are the knowledge, skills, and abilities for everyone that's gonna operate a vehicle or have the company that they that they know what they're doing.

In that is the the piece of, you know, they've got a background. We've checked their background. We've checked their NVR.

They on paper, they look like a good candidate. So maybe they've got the knowledge and the skills and abilities. So another step you can take is put your eyes on them and and ensure that they can proficiently operate the vehicle that they're gonna operate, whatever that is. It's a light duty vehicle or it's a heavy vehicle, whatever.

So that's important to understand all that.

Translate that into a a litigation case, you know, plaintiff lawyer gets the the defendant to deposition and they ask them, could they drive that vehicle? Yes. They could. How did you know? And so if you've got the case where you said, well, we put eyes on them and we saw, you know, we we actually witnessed them operate this vehicle and at that time they could safely do so. So that's where that becomes important is this understanding that when you bring somebody on onboard a driver that they have the full KSAs to do to do the job.

Maintenance and repair of equipment is another piece.

Ensuring that the vehicles are pre trip, post trip, all the vehicle inspections occur, the annual inspections.

Making sure that all those occur and are timely. And most importantly, that if a defect is noted, that it gets resolved and it's documented. And so that documentation is is the know, the old saying where if it it says if it if it's not documented, it didn't happen. And that that rings true here.

Ten thousand percent compliant with laws, regulations, your own policies and procedures, practices, and and standards.

And what we mean by ten thousand percent compliance is that we're a hundred percent compliant a hundred percent of the time.

You see the the line here, use technology. Don't let it use you. That's important because we've got most most companies now are using some type of a telematics system, which is great.

But with that comes a lot of data, a tremendous amount of data. And so, you know, you've got we've got folks that have the settings on their telematics system where they never delete that data. It's just out there forever.

And so that could in turn be used against you. If you don't have some type of a data retention policy for the company and having those settings in a telematics system that align with that, that says we keep these events, the horse driving events, the speeding, the GPS location, we keep them for one year, whatever the case is, ninety days, six months, whatever the case is, making sure that your company policy lines up with that and you are actually deleting or dumping that data off of the system along with that policy. Very important that those match up.

And you have to hit the the sweet spot for for you with regard to what is the right time. How how long should I keep this? And I do wanna say that if you've got a a crash or you've got an event where you've got data, you always wanna preserve that data into your own file so you can keep it for until the the case would be would be litigated and disposed of.

So use technology. Don't let it use you.

And that's a case for that. And also another one is DVIRs. Most of these telematics systems have really good inspection systems with them where it gives a driver a checklist that they can use.

If they note a defect, it automatically can go to the the technicians, the mechanics, or whomever.

But one thing that that I see occasionally is that a driver put something in there, a defect or a deficiency, and we forget to take it out and it hangs up there for a long time. And so you wanna make sure that if you're using something like that, that it's that it's dealt with and it's gets resolved in that system.

So then you hit get into the monitor piece.

And monitoring is what I always say is if you can see it, you can manage it. You we manage what we monitor.

So get into the regulatory compliance piece. And, there's a blended audience here. There's some pure trucking companies, and there are some that are regulated that are in vocational space.

So DOT comes into play when we get to certain types of vehicles or hurt hauling certain commodities.

It becomes important that compliance with the FMCSA and state is fundamental. It's a fundamental to your risk risk control program because if that gets exploited when bad things happen, then it snowballs.

Compliance failures, patterns of noncompliance by companies can be exploited by plaintiff lawyers.

And then DOT can also have regulatory enforcement as well in the tune of civil assessments, and those today range from around fifteen hundred dollars to about a hundred thousand dollars.

There's DOT ratings, satisfactory, conditional, and satisfactory.

With that information, there's lost business opportunities potentially. And then there's also that direct influence on your insurance.

So when a packet is submitted to an insurance carrier underwriter, they look at this information. One of the first things they'll do is pull what's called a cab report, and that is basically your company's DOT data, how how well you're performing on roadside inspections, if you've had any previous audits and things like that with DOT, and that's all most of that's publicly available information.

So when you get into regs by the the commodity you haul or the size of vehicle you're in, you know, in some flavor, all of these regulations are gonna apply, specifically that first grouping. So if I'm in a in a vehicle that's ten thousand one pound GVWR and greater and I'm in interstate commerce, that first grouping of regulations are all applicable to me.

And then if I'm in a larger vehicle or by design hauling passengers or hazmat, that second grouping that says commercial driver license is in play as well, which then triggers drug and alcohol, testing, driver training requirements, and things like that. So pretty easy for a trucking company. We've got tractors and we've got trailers and we've got large trucks. Pretty well know what we're what we're dealing with in that regard. But if we're in a vocational environment, we've got a three quarter ton pickup with the GVWR of ninety five hundred pounds, we're not regulated even in interstate commerce. But if we back under that flatbed trailer, that puts us into not just inside the DOT regulations, but also requires a commercial driver license to operate. So there's the nuances in the regulations that, you know, sometimes it doesn't look like it's a commercial vehicle, not regulated, but it very easily can become regulated.

So with that, we can get into, you know, how does DOT score us as a company, as a regulated fleet? And so there's what they call the CSA, compliance safety and accountability.

And through through that, they've got what's called the safety measurement system. And in that, there are seven buckets. And these are the unsafe driving, crash, hours of service, vehicle maintenance, drugs and alcohol, hazmat, and then driver fitness. Those are all categories within CSA that DOT scores us as regulated companies separately.

So if you look at unsafe driving, you know, that's your driver's speeding, reckless driving, lane usage, things like that. So on down the line. And those are the most common violations. And if you look at vehicle maintenance, you know, you always say brake lights and tires. It's it's pretty common that's your your higher volume violations or or brakes, lights, and then and then tire violations. So looking through those, those are where we're held accountable by DOT, and that's all based off of roadside inspection activity.

All that information is available to insurance carriers through those CAD reports, but it's also all available to the public. It's all publicly visible through anybody that's got the Internet. So they can log in and look and see these violations. The only thing that's really scrubbed from the public view is the percentile scores that DOT uses and compares against, peer group carriers.

Sometimes I'll get asked what is our DOT score. Matter of fact, I had an email come in just a little bit ago before this meeting started. I wanna know what our DOT score is. And there's really not a single DOT score. It's those basics. It's those seven basics that are kinda categorically scored.

However, DOT, FMCSA has an algorithm that those seven basics influence into what's called the inspection selection system. This is not a DOT score, if you will. It's a determining factor what DOT uses for the state partners of FMCSA, what they're gonna plug in a DOT number and say, what's the ISS score? Do I wanna look at this truck or not?

That's a determining factor for a roadside inspection in some cases. So when you see that score, and the public doesn't have access to this either. But if you see that score, anything between one and forty nine on ISS score is a pass. Anything between fifty and seventy four is an optional expect inspection, and anything north of seventy five is a shall inspect, basically.

And that's the direction to that law enforcement officer or inspector that's punched that number in is looking. That's what that ISS is designed for.

However, it does appear on that cab report that insurance underwriters look at, and that is almost the gospel looking at that. So it becomes important. It's important to manage that score. And, again, that score is influenced by those seven basics, the crashes, the roadside inspection, the violations, the brakes, lights, and tires, and things like that.

So now we're at the main event here.

Using telematics scorecards.

So what I like to do is given that that most fleets operate with some type of telematics system today.

They don't all use cameras. It's blended on the camera piece. Some use forward facing cameras. Some use dual facing cameras with them on the driver, and some use multi angle cameras getting some blind spots and and other pieces.

The benefit of taking this data and turning it into a scorecard is huge.

What it will do for you is, I'll give you an example of, you know, back in the day and they still do it, telematics system will the the network the provider will tell you, you can get us an a text alert every time one of your vehicles are speeding.

And that sounds great, but it's not manageable. If you if you did this back in the day and when I got about sixteen to twenty thousand of those a month, I kinda threw my hands up so I give up.

So instead of that, what we would do is aggregate that data, and I'm gonna show you kind of a a system to do that. Most most of these telematics systems will have a canned scorecard contained within them.

So the scorecard in general, they're gonna support your company strategy. And in my mind, a company strategy is a, we don't wanna have crashes. B, we wanna lower insurance or get the best value on our insurance. So it's it's there.

These telematics scorecards are balanced.

There's they're all objective data. There's no subjectivity in these scorecards. In other words, a driver will get out of them what they put into them.

Obviously, they're gonna identify gaps. Anything that I'm doing while I'm driving, a gap what I would say, what I would like in a gap to on my driving is a bad habit. If I've got bad habits, that's what I wanna see.

If I've got behaviors, I don't wanna really put a behavior like texting and driving or seat belt, something like that. I don't really wanna put that on a scorecard because it shows a couple of things. It shows that I've got tolerance for as a company leader, I've got tolerance for somebody to not wear a seat belt because we're gonna give them a the ability to to get a score while not wearing seat belt versus if you handle those differently and don't put those on scorecard, they fare a little bit better.

Scorecards promote good management and what you'll see here in a few slides is the engagement piece of a scorecard is very powerful.

These scorecards also complement your incentive programs and pretty much any kind of incentive program, however they work, these things really just dovetail right into the incentive program.

And ultimately, you're you'll see that the scorecards are gonna tell your story.

So the data that we see out of these telematics, you look think of them as the gateway and the camera.

The gateway piece is what plugs into the ECU of your vehicle.

They work with all different kinds of vehicles. They work with light duty vehicles. They got a different plug that they use, and they use with big heavy trucks.

What you get out of them is location, speeding data, heartbreaking, those harsh events, harsh turns, fast acceleration.

If you're a regulated DOT regulated company that requires records of duty status, they'll show hours of service violations.

Those DVIRs for the the pre and post trip inspections are in there.

The they also have engine fault codes, transmission fault codes, tire pressure monitoring, RPMs, engine RPM, and miles per gallon and engine idle.

So those cameras, in addition to that, have they show you distractions. They show you following distance, driver fatigue, events, seat belt events, lane usage events, stop signs, the texting and driving, and all that is in that camera visibility.

So when I look at the scorecard implementation, again, I I don't encourage putting behaviors that are the texting and driving, the seat belts.

I'd rather leave those off of this because if I put them on this and I've got the ability to still get a decent score and not do that, not wear my seat belt, it's going to show that there's tolerance there and they're gonna take it. So they'll do that behavior. But if you don't put those on this scorecard and you take the company's disciplinary policy approach to those known behaviors, they know they're not supposed to do that. You've told them this is this is the rules. This is our company policy.

Then go directly to the disciplinary route, the the, you know, the the verbal warning, the written warning on down the line.

The other reason I don't personally like to put those on this scorecard system is because this scorecard is really a positive thing. It's it's not a punitive tool.

So if you put something on this scorecard that you're gonna in turn punish somebody over, then it's gonna not work as well as what it could if you kept this as a positive. Now I get that that there's gonna be the high ranking drivers and the low ranking drivers. Of course, you're gonna coach that up and you'll give some some milestones and some some benchmarking like that along the way, but those behaviors that you don't want, I wouldn't put them on here.

So when you go through to develop this, you know, you define your metrics, you know, what's a hard break?

What does that look like? What's that feel like? You know, speeding, harsh turning. And so in all these telematics systems, there are settings.

And I'll give you an example.

I was at a client last fall and they were doing the the benchmarking piece of this, which we're gonna talk about. And they were running the numbers and every driver was in the nineties.

And I I've done a lot of these folks, and I've never seen a scorecard out of the gate be where everybody's already meeting our goals. So we went in and started looking at those settings and that's where the the issue was. It was they were all off the off the radar that there couldn't be any hard brakes because the hard brake was set so so far off the the, you know, the the fast acceleration.

And so once we kinda got those lined up to where we felt like it should be, then it brought the scores down. The benchmark looked like a normal benchmark, and then that gave us something to work with. So, you know, take, a hard break, and all these telematics are a little different in how they set them up. Some of them relate that to you in like a a miles per hour per second drop in speed. Some of them allow you to plug in a g force.

They all should have recommended settings, but think of, like, a point four seven or forty seven one hundredths of a g on a hard brake is equal to a ten point three mile an hour change in speed and a hard brake. And so when I rolled these things out in the past, of course, knowing these things, where these things are set and go take this to the drivers to train them, I don't tell them that they're getting the ten point three or forty seven hundredths of a g force because they'd look at me like I got two heads. So I give them this information in their training for this and, like, alright. You got a toolbox in the back of the truck and you slam on the brakes and the toolbox shifts and it hits the the the pickup bed of the of the pickup. That's a hard brake. That's what we're talking about here. So if you can relate that, how you've got these settings to to the, you know, the drivers, then then they'll have an understanding of what you're looking for.

So you value those, though. Once you get into that that, we're looking at these, we're plugging in value. So what is it what's it worth to you? So, you know, when I've always fashioned these these waiting and the scoring, I wanna make it to where I'm challenging people, but also they gotta have a way to to do good.

And so you you gotta weigh all that in. And so, like, for example, if you say, you know, speeding, we're gonna weight speeding at ten percent or fifteen percent. So if everything else that on the on the scorecard is perfect and we just have a lead foot, then they can't get to where you want them to be. So it's gonna cause them to to to kinda pick up the pace and do what they're supposed to do on their speeding and slow down a little bit.

So just kinda think of it that way.

And then for the lesser the lesser metrics like idle or over RPM, things like that, you know, you would weight those far less.

And and still you're giving someone a a challenge to to improve, but it's not gonna kill them if they don't get there with it.

And you'll see that here in just a little while as well. So once you've done these things, you know, you you look at you know, right, so heartbreaks, how many is too many? And so we we really wanna stress that there is an expectation that if you need to use your brakes while you're driving that you do that. And the score scorecard in no way will ever influence that if you need to use your brakes, use your brakes.

But if we take the scorecard and say, you know, we've got these drivers that drive twenty five hundred miles a month, we've got these drivers that drive twelve thousand, whatever, we need to kinda normalize that with their exposure. So the more miles they're driving, yeah, there would be more chances of them having a hard brake. So we would have some kind of a cushion, if you will, built into it so that there's they understand that when I need to use my brakes, I'll use my brakes. But if I have an excessive amount of those, it's gonna start weighing on my score.

And from there, you you establish establish those expectations. You know, what are you what do we want out of this? What's it look like? You're gonna design it kind of something like this.

And and just so you know, all these telematics have their own flavor of a scorecard, and they all have a way to export them into set like a Excel spreadsheet. And that's kinda what you see the example here across the board. You know, you've got your total score. You've got your hours of service violations that were weighted at fifteen percent for this example.

You got your speed at ten percent, acceleration ten, cornering ten, excessive hard brakes ten, driver distractions, twenty, and following distance, twenty five. So that's just like examples to throw out there. All of those which would equal a hundred hundred points possible across that entire scorecard.

And so that's kinda how you would set that up.

When you benchmark, I recommend a minimum of a three month benchmark because you need to know where you're at to know where you're going with this thing.

From there and I'll show you some examples of that in just a minute. But from there, you're gonna take to the to the training. So you're gonna do the training for this scorecard. The more formal you do this and the more systematic you do this process to where the drivers can start expecting this scorecard data to come out on the fifth day of the month with the previous month's data.

The the more systematic it is, the better it will fare. And then two, top down top down support, and, you know, the the entire company kinda embraces this thing and and it ends up being since it's not a punitive tool, it's more a carrot, not a stick. You know, it becomes kinda something that that we start having a little competition around. So we've got drivers calling in and saying, hey.

You know, where am I at? You know, I'm I'm I'm paying attention. And so they start expecting these scores to come out each month if you do it on a monthly program.

So and you'll you'll definitely see some improved driving.

And I wanted to say too, you know, just out of the gate with the very first time that I did a scorecard, it's been many years ago, but my biggest challenge was a lawyer. It was our general counsel at the company I worked for, and he was dead set against a scorecard. You mean you're gonna put a score out there on these drivers and that's that's you know, it's gonna be exposed or it's an indictment on the company. And and so it took me a little time, but I convinced him that, look, every driver that works for this company meets our minimum requirements. They are all qualified drivers. This tool is only to make qualified drivers better drivers. And he bit he bought off on it and it went went went fine, went very well with that.

So once you are ready for the you've done the benchmark, you're gonna do your training, this is what the scorecard would look like. You know, if you do it on a monthly recurring schedule, you do this once a month, you know, you're saying, alright. We've got a hundred points possible on this scorecard.

We're only asking you to get a ninety or better.

The goal being that we get a hundred percent of our drivers getting that green. I always call it a green score. We wanna get a green score. It's ninety or better, and we want a hundred percent of our fleet in a green score.

Then you have that ability to incorporate data in the performance reviews, promotion opportunities, and then you see the performance really take off from there.

There's also a part of these that I would encourage is that each one of the metrics that you put on the scorecard that you build out a coaching tool that describes the behaviors, describes the scoring on it, and most importantly, what do I have to do to get a good score? And so this is hand this is used for, obviously, the training, complements the training when you roll this thing out.

But then when you've got a frontline leader that you're relying on to coach the drivers or you've got a terminal manager or or something along that line, this is their tool to engage with. And so it becomes very important.

And it's got all those behaviors, the breaking, the speeding, and and, you know, what's your company's position on it, how it's gonna scored, and how I get a good score out of it. So works pretty well.

So had a question come up, and this question comes up fairly often is that, hey. We wanna do this. We know we've got this data, but we don't have a hundred percent buy in. We've got some some, you know, be it a foreman, be it a terminal manager, whatever the case is.

They're just not too sure about it. They've got questions about it. They don't think the data is accurate. So once you do this benchmark, you're gonna see that most of these systems now have really good data.

They've cleaned it up. They they use, you know, their own camera systems with a lot of these telematics are now learning the speed zone. So it's in a large part pretty clean now. And so the the data from these systems are pretty lot reliable.

So how do you get compliance or how do you get accountability or how do you get that buy in?

The only way I could ever get buy in was by rolling these scorecards up levels.

In other words, if you if you bring drivers to an orientation, you know, you can you can pretty much have drivers drinking the company's Kool Aid. You know, they they've they'll, you know, they'll they'll be singing your praises that, hey. You you guys really do this? You know, and you really you you guys really do this the the right way and and so on.

And the first day they get out to where they're assigned, you know, the the the story changes a little bit and then they get a little disillusioned and and things like that. So if when you adopt a scorecard or stand up a scorecard program, obviously, the drivers are all gonna get one. You have a frontline leader. You've got a you know, the line manager there that that he's he's there supposed to be leading from the front, but does he be is he accountable for what those drivers do?

And so if you roll that scorecard up and that frontline leader also gets a scorecard and that supervisor effectiveness score is thirty five percent of that driver scorecard for all his drivers, then that becomes more important to him.

Then there's some some other performance. And and one thing that I would say about these scorecards, we're sticking to driving behaviors today, but if you when you can export that scorecard into a spreadsheet, you could add other KPIs for the company into that and then weight it accordingly.

And so, you know, I've done these where you put some operational performance in these scorecards and it's not just the driving behavior, just mostly the driving behaviors because that's what we're we're looking for.

But then there's some other things in, like, the the terminal manager, that p and l manager, you know, maybe there's some more things there. I've done things like, you know, had had a sizable fleet in North Dakota and couldn't really get that manager that district level manager on board with with some of the safety programs. He was more revenue driven. So we hung up, put put preventable crashes for that area each month on that scorecard, and so he was responsible for that. So in regulatory compliances, you know, you can you can punish a driver for logbook violations all you want, but if he's got a manager pushing him, you know, at a remote location to get it done no matter what, So we've kinda rolled some of those things up too. So this is the the secret sauce for getting buy in, getting the engagement from the field frontline leaders and and, you know, the field management.

This is so powerful. I can't can't stress that enough how powerful this is that when you're scoring them and their scores relying on how well, you know, the people that work for them do holistically and not just from a revenue standpoint. So this is very, very powerful.

So with that, take a few minutes to go through some sample results, sample data that I'll go over with you that I'll just tell you that the results are gonna vary. Everybody's a little differently.

But the data that you'll see here is pretty consistent with scorecard implementations around that I've seen.

So it's you'll see things like this by doing these things.

So this was a scorecard that the benchmark score this was a three month benchmark, and the benchmark score was a sixty six out of that hundred points.

The same month we launched the benchmark, we finished the benchmark and was readying the training piece. The same month we did that, rolled out the training the very next month, the score started going up. And you can see on that graph, they went up to ninety six point eight. And that was that was powerful.

The over speed percentage over the speed, you know, when you look at that and you look at the whole fleet at large and you say, well, we're thirty percent over the posted speed limit.

My goodness. You know? It's a lot.

But when you start after that benchmark, you start on that training and and you start holding people accountable for these these behaviors, you know, you gotta slow down. This is where it goes.

Heartbreak applications, the same thing. You got your benchmark score and then you start, you know, scorecarding and hold them accountable.

They they move. This is our service record of duty status violations per hundred thousand miles. They dropped to nearly nothing.

This is interesting. This was a piece that, you know, collaborate across your your company. You've got maintenance folks, management, you know, operations folks.

This is important to for that collaboration because the maintenance folks had a little interest in this and, you know, they they want to know, you know, hey. Are we operating these vehicles like we like them? And so are we operating these vehicles? So this particular telematics scored excessive RPMs and it was percentage of time over seventeen hundred RPMs is what exactly what you're looking at. And so didn't weight it very much. I think it was weighted, like, five percent.

But look at the results. You you issue the challenge and and you get results.

Same thing with idle.

And this speaks to the importance of a good benchmark Because if you benchmark and you're looking at idle and you're looking at this one, this benchmark was eighty seven point four percent idle time. So that means eighty seven point four percent of my entire fleet's vehicles were idling out of the out of their total operational time. That's significant. Well, guess what? We were running pumps. We were running different things requiring PTO, requiring idle.

Other companies have maybe safety policies in the heat, in the in the cold in the winter, the heat, the summer, you know, where we've gotta have a place for our our guys to go sit in the in the cool air conditioned vehicle for a little while. So that's important to know where you're at on that benchmark so that you can set up a challenge accordingly. So you don't wanna set up a challenge, say, well, we're at eighty seven percent. We wanna get to five percent idle because it's not gonna happen.

And so if you challenge a ten point differential though, let's try to get to seventy five, you'll get results out of that.

And I was with a client sometime back and we were looking at their idle and they had what it amounted to was five thousand gallons a month of fuel consumed while their vehicles were idling. And so, you know, if you just cut that in half, that's a very sizable savings.

And so it's gonna increase your MPG significantly. And here's here was this particular scorecard was, you know, started at four point five MPG and and got it up to to five point six across the board was pretty good, you know, and that that was a a significant savings for that company on an annualized basis. So there's more reason than just the risk piece of it to really look at all this data from these scorecards.

This is the all crashes. So this was the crash picture pre and post implementation on this, and you see a forty two percent reduction relative to that baseline average, which is pretty significant.

Then when you look at the those that were considered preventable crashes, it was very significant. You get you're looking at seventy one percent reduction in crashes and that's that's huge.

So take take seventy one percent on any size of the fleet and that's gonna be big dollars. So at the end of the day, these things this prog project will pay for itself.

Here's another another one, forty eight percent reduction in preventable crashes. But there's one interesting piece that I wanted to show you and, of course, probably have some safety folks on here, not just fleet folks.

This is kind of telling and this this is OSHA recordable injuries that were in tandem with this scorecard that you keep track of and chart these things, this indicates that that scorecard changed the culture to that company some. When you see that that that's dropping some of those OSHA recordable injuries and first aid injuries and some of the OSHA events, it's kind of a big deal.

So when you get that engagement and that accountability from your frontline leaders and you've got, you know, your frontline employees doing what you want them to do and they're accountable for their driving and they it kinda spills over into some of their safety, their day to day safety. So it's it's a pretty big deal.

And and that's all the reasons for, you know you look at it from your entire insurance program, there there could be more meat on the bone with with the savings or, you know, the the when McGriff goes to market, you know, for on your behalf to the to the insurance carriers. And so all these things are the the scorecards, all these things that I've shown you are, what I like to say, performance based.

So if if you do these things and you generate these types of results, there's your story. And it makes it so easy to go and tell your story when when you've got these performance based levers that you've pulled using these telematics systems. And it's not just the driving, it's compliance. You can get some compliance, you know, the pre trips, post trips, the hours of service. So it's kind of a holistic approach, especially when you see this this OSHA recordable injury reduction in in recordable. So it it becomes a big deal.

So with that that said, we'd like to I've got some final comments, but I would like to open up for for questions now. Lasagna?

Alright. Well, thank you so much, Casey. There's a lot of good information that you've shared with us. We did have a couple of questions that came through on the box, and I do thank those who responded. We did have one question that was in reference to, providing some examples of a catastrophic accident that had occurred in Florida. So we did get a couple of people that provided some answers to that. But another question that we have, this is when you was talking about the ISS score, and they wanted to know, does it apply to non CDL trucks?

Yes. It does. So that's, you know, kind of a a misnomer by some folks because when when we think of DOT and FMCSA that, you know, we always see that big tractor trailer and that's, you know, yep. Got it.

And and but that's not true. I mean, you know, you think about and going back to that example, that pickup and trailer that I showed you. Yeah. That does happen to require CDL just based on its weight rating, but any vehicle that's used in interstate commerce that is ten thousand one pounds or more, GVWR or latent weight is a regulated vehicle, and that vehicle is subject to inspection.

And, yes, that does influence the ISS score because DOT wants to see those as much as they do the over the road trucking and and the, you know, the the specialized fleets and things.

I will say that vocational, you know, that that scenario, those those trucks, those pickups, the light duties, the the mid, you know, the mid range of vocational fleets are a bit of a disadvantage in in some ways with regard to the FMCSA scoring because they have fewer miles because they're doing other things. You know, they're they're doing oil field work, power line work, construction work, whatever the case is. And so they're gonna have far fewer miles than a a, you know, a trucking fleet. And so some of those basic categories are influenced by the miles they operate.

So you look at it, you know, a a fleet of, you know, two or three, four hundred pickups, they operate two million miles versus, you know, eighteen, twenty million miles, you know, with a a trucking fleet. So there is a difference there. But, yes, the answer to your question is yes. ISS score is is does take into account those anything that's regulated regardless of whether it's a CDL vehicle or not.

Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you for that, Casey. And, of course, everyone will receive a copy of the presentation slides, and you will have Casey's contact information. I did get another question that come up.

Out of all the telematics metrics that are capable of being measured, have you seen driver facing cameras move the needle any further than the other standard telematics measured metrics?

It it does, and I should have stated, and I did not.

I will now. The the driver facing camera, you know, we were talking about, you know, you don't want those alerts, you don't want the speeding alerts or ineffective and and to to a degree they are. That's where you wanna aggregate those those events into something that comes out monthly.

The camera based events are totally different.

The the you yes. You can incorporate those in the scorecard, but you what you don't wanna have as a company is a telematic platform with a driver facing camera and a bunch of bad events out there and we didn't act on them. We didn't have a coaching event because most all these telematics these camera systems that that are out there, they've got a platform where you can even you can cascade that or delegate that that coaching to a frontline supervisor.

And when they coach, they have absolutely gotta go in that system and say, have coached this driver on this event because see it a lot. There's a lot of events out there and we didn't coach the driver on it and he's got you know, they start stacking up on that driver and then, of course, that builds we're we're indicting ourself on that.

So which and I'll say this too. You know, like I've said on the scorecard, you can export this thing into the spreadsheet. That's a perfect place to park this, you know, for a supervisor. If you assign supervisor to coaching a, you know, a group of drivers, most of these telematics give use they tell you, hey.

These guys haven't ever been coached. You've assigned these. They weren't coached. So you can put that in the scorecard for that supervisor saying, hey.

You're not doing a good job coaching here. You need to step it step it up a little bit. So we've gotta get these things, you know, out of the system and coached. But more importantly or as importantly, these coachings have gotta be effective because if we if we coach ad nauseam, we can coach and coach and we've got the same drivers doing the same things, that's not good.

And so, you know, and and and that's the other piece to it is when these we've got these scorecards and some companies like to anonymize the data. They don't want other people knowing, hey. Me, personally, I think if you want some competition out of it, publish it and make a big deal about it. And I'm getting ready to go into these tips for success.

You know, I'll go ahead and go into that. Just guys, make this thing formal. It's gotta be systematic. It's gotta be top down. You gotta have one hundred percent buy in.

It's a carrot. It's not a stick.

You it's not a punitive tool at all.

But as importantly, I can tell you, I when I did these things, when I was doing these things in the industry like you, I shifted my focus from chasing crashes, investigating crashes, doing the risk piece, all the stuff that goes into an event, and got to redirect my energy to basically cheerleading this scorecard because I was having fewer events. And so just like I said here, make a splash with it. The bigger, the more you put into the rah rah and, you know, when you publish the scorecard, you celebrate those wins and let let's say, even when you do the initial training, you're gonna say, you know, here's the expectation.

And by the way, if I can get these fifteen guys to stand up or gals to stand up, you know, you're already there. Guess what? You know? And so you're showing a couple things here that look, this is achievable because we've already got people doing it and they didn't know he's even gonna do this.

So each month, this thing assuming you would do it on a monthly interval, each month, you're gonna add to that group more and more. You'll have entire divisions and, you know, half the company. And so it's it's so important to celebrate those things and make a big deal out of those wins every time you have them because it just grows this thing. And it'll also stoke that competition between not just the the frontline employees, but if you got divisional competitions going on between different business units, It's powerful.

So powerful. And then the last piece of that's holding those leaders equally accountable. I in my world, it was they always gotta pass and, you know, we hold hold frontline people the frontline employees accountable, but the the leaders, you know, they were good if they had the the right revenue that looked good. They they gotta pass, but if you hold them accountable for this holistic, the driving, and any other thing that's important to the company, this is where it becomes important.

Awesome. Great information. And as you're providing tips for success, I did get one last question in that we'll try to get before we, end the call.

Would you recommend speed governors?

They are currently considering that being the third strike for frequent flyers over a certain speed limit. So what would be your recommendations for that?

I personally never liked governors or speed limiters just for the because I can do it with this scorecard. If I can rather than take somebody's ability to speed away, I hold them accountable and have them have the right behavior. It seemed effective for for me.

Mhmm. Now it may not be right for everybody.

And I had one final comment if I could.

So a lot of folks I've been asked many times, hey. What's my discount? I do this. I don't know of any, you know, the I don't have a a a story for stated discounts. There are more and more insurance carriers.

They're they're really looking at this. They're they're offering competitive rates for in exchange for the data. So if you're willing to let your insurance carrier have access to this data, you you stand to see a a especially if you've done this process and you've got the performance based look what we did, I think that would be really good for a company.

Our parent company, Marsh McLennan Agency, you know, learned that they had a a deal with, Indigo, And they've they've got Indigo as offering some very competitive rates for using Samsara data. So those things are out there. I've not seen many here's your stated discount, but I have seen the performance based, hey, you know, we'll give you credits based on how you do over the course of, you know, this this policy year. And so maybe next year looks a little bit better if you perform well.

Awesome. Well, thank you again, Casey, for this wonderful presentation. As I alluded to earlier, everyone will receive a copy of the presentation slides as well as the recording afterwards. And so, you will have Casey's contact information. So I'm sure if additional questions come up after this call, you will be able to reach out to him.

But, again, on behalf of McGriff, we would like to thank each of you for joining us joining this presentation, and we hope that you have a wonderful rest of your day.

Thank so much. You're welcome. Take care.