The free to use Fleet Safety Benchmarking tool – www.fleetsafetybenchmarking.net – is being delivered as a contribution to the work of the Occupational Road Safety Alliance (ORSA) by the team behind the Driving for Better Business (DfBB) campaign with backing from the Department for Transport and in collaboration with a range of fleet-related organisations.
The tool enables employers across all sectors to measure their at-work road safety performance against a wide-range of other organisations.
Measuring both processes and outcomes, the tool is suitable for use across a comprehensive range of vehicle types including company cars, motorcycles, light commercial vehicles, HGVs, minibuses, buses and ‘grey fleet’ vehicles.
The tool uses 30 questions to examine an employer’s current practices across six key areas: Road safety management policy; organisational leadership and culture; journey and mobility management; driver recruitment, induction, management and wellbeing; vehicle selection, safety, management and security; and corporate, community and supply chain road safety.
A report will then provide question by question responses and feedback including questions scored and reported against averages determined from other users’ information, data tables and graphs based on each of the six sections of gap analysis. Data analysis will provide information on collision rates per vehicle and per one million kilometres driven as well as by vehicle and incident type and location.
After analysing how a specific fleet compares with other tool users, registered participants will be able to access a wealth of resources to enable existing policies to be updated and new risk management solutions introduced. That includes links to best practice and case studies, surgery and good practice request processes and conference call discussions.
The tool will be unveiled at today’s (2 March) RoSPA Road Safety Conference by Melvyn Hodgetts, DfBB campaign manager.
He said: “Fleet decision-makers will know the risk management solutions they have implemented and their outcomes. But is that performance good so momentum can be maintained or can results be improved? Benchmarking will provide the answers.
“Fleet safety is most likely to be improved by the introduction of an integrated set of measures based on the safety culture within an organisation and benchmarking is one of the most effective ways of achieving improvements to road safety in a corporate setting.”
The new tool is a significant enhancement of Interactive Driving Systems’ Fleet Safety Gap Analysis, an online 10-question solution that allows fleets to benchmark their own responses against those of currently almost 1,400 participants providing an insight into the safety of an organiation’s vehicles and drivers and how they rank against others.
Will Murray, research director, Interactive Driving Systems, said: “Benchmarking safety performance against others is important for many reasons. They include identifying what peers in the fleet industry are doing enabling ‘me too’ outcomes; identifying what is realistic without having to reinvent the wheel; helping make the business case for safety internally as what gets measured, gets bettered; and provides greater corporate confidence in terms of health and safety compliance regulations.”
