This week Brake is hosting its annual Road Safety Week and the theme is ‘Step Up for Safe Streets’. The focus is to challenge all of us to think about how we get around. In terms of commercial fleet safety, that’s how you optimise vehicle journeys, and how you coach your drivers to be aware of, anticipate, and avoid hazards. How you design delivery spaces and ensure safe parking and unloading in our streets. How you make sure that speed is always appropriate to the prevailing conditions and not simply held at the legal limit. How you eliminate driver distraction.

SmartDrive Systems aims to make it as easy as possible for fleet managers to get real world results in terms of preventing collisions, lowering fleet risk and effectively coaching drivers to be their very best and safest on the roads. Our programme is a safe journey solution – however, there is a really important concept which is often, curiously, overlooked.

Real world results.

That means saving lives, protecting drivers, preventing injury. It also means saving money on fleet insurance, on unscheduled downtime, on vehicle repair. It means protecting your brand.

There is no point in investing in a camera system but only ever checking the footage after a collision. That won’t save lives, money or your brand reputation.

There is no point in having a mobile phone policy or a seatbelt policy but never knowing whether your drivers comply with it once they’ve left the depot. That won’t save lives, money or your brand.

At SmartDrive we know that the biggest obstacles to fleet managers ensuring excellent driver performance are:

1. Not knowing what their drivers are doing on the road
2. Not having the time, objectivity or expertise to review hours of camera footage
3. Not having the objective evidence and salient points on hand to make driver coaching sessions objective and constructive
4. Not having an effective means to protect and exonerate your drivers when not-at-fault
5. Not being able to recognise and reward good drivers in a programmatic and motivating way

We’ve designed our programme to solve these points. The driver can get on with his job and not worry about the SmartDrive cameras. Fleet managers can get on with their jobs and,  while they are earning their livings, we’ll be doing our job for you.

We don’t wait for collisions to happen. We highlight the risky driving behaviours that occur, we capture them, we objectively analyse them and we give the fleet manager the essential information and evidence to make that driver aware of how to cut his or her risk. Job done.

Let’s all join with Brake this week in celebrating Road Safety Week. It’s in our power, together, to make collisions a thing of the past. All you have to do is ask yourself: Is our fleet really doing everything it can to achieve real world safety results?