Three Tips to Better Manage Accident Risk for Your Transportation Firm

In May 2019, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) published its 2017 Large Truck and Bus Crash Facts. And let’s just say: sometimes facts are scarier than fiction. So, how can you manage accident risk for your transportation firm?

According to FMCSA, there was a 9-percent increase in fatal accidents involving trucks or buses between 2016 and 2017, and there was a 4-percent increase in crashes resulting in injury. Total, that’s over 120,000 crashes involving trucks or buses in one year. And with over 1,500 clients with 300,000 drivers collectively, we aim to help you manage your firm’s accident risk and protect your human resources.

After the Accident

Those 120,000 crashes resulted in even more people and families whose lives were affected, and many resulted in lawsuits. Additionally, valuable time was lost, and delivery schedules were delayed, costing shipping, receiving, and trucking companies hundreds of thousands of dollars. And ultimately, many trucking companies were assigned a DOT Compliance Review.

What is a DOT Compliance Review?

Similar to a safety audit, a DOT Compliance Review is an onsite examination by the FMCSA. Major accidents, poor CSA scores, complaints, and violations can trigger a DOT Compliance Review.

DOT Compliance Reviews will examine records closely, so it is imperative to have reliable, date-stamped, cloud-based storage for all your driver training records.

Before the Accident

What if those accidents could have been avoided? How many lives could we save, and how many hours could we get back if we could prevent accidents instead of solving “after?” As the old saying goes, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

What would it take to prevent accidents? We’ve compiled a list of our top three tips for managing your transportation company’s accident risks.

Maintain and deploy your company’s policies and procedures on a regular basis. The best policies and procedures don’t mean anything if not used effectively. In a DOT Compliance Review, your policies and procedures will be requested, and you open your company up to serious compliance risk if they aren’t followed. How do you effectively deploy policies and procedures to your workforce? There’s an app for that.
Hire and retain the best drivers. The trucking industry has a high turnover rate, and transportation companies need to stay competitive in today’s market to retain great drivers. Recognition, engagement and ongoing, user-friendly training help keep your drivers on the road and delivering their best results.
Use Infiniti-I Workforce Solutions’ online safety training. Most of your drivers have base-level safety knowledge. Still, Infinity-I Workforce Solutions goes above and beyond with great safety training modules that are quick, easily digestible, and mobile-friendly, to ensure that every driver in your fleet has high-quality training they can easily access and use.

In today’s high-risk, high-turnover environment, you must provide safety training. We can help customize your training plans to avoid the dreaded DOT Compliance Review and other associated risks of the road. Contact one of our experts today, and together we can build the plan that’s right for your business needs.

Key Takeaways for managing accident risk:

• Accidents are more frequent than ever before, and trucking companies must mitigate their accident risk to keep their companies profitable and keep drivers safe.
• Hiring and retaining the best drivers make a huge difference to a company’s risk profile.
• High-quality training and updates on policies and procedures are a must in today’s high-risk environment. Infiniti-I Workforce Solutions can work with you to customize your driver training tools—keeping safety standards high and costs low.