Continuously monitoring your drivers’ CSA status will keep them in compliance and your business on track. Case in point, Estes Express Lines has seen a 10% reduction in CSA violations.
Regulations — they’re an unfortunate fact of life for trucking fleets of all types. For many fleet safety managers, keeping track of their Compliance, Safety, and Accountability (CSA) status is an onerous, time-consuming task.
Often the data isn’t available right away and only on Excel spreadsheets that can’t be readily downloaded. For multi-state fleets, there may be even more inconvenience, since tracking status can require time-consuming compiling of data from multiple government websites that wastes both precious staff time and money.
But keeping track of CSA status is a necessary activity to keep drivers on the road and business on track. Without committing resources to CSA monitoring, fleet safety managers can be blindsided by not knowing a driver has a CSA violation until it is discovered after a monthly sms update. For a driver, this could mean being put out of service, receiving points against his or her BASIC score, and a monetary fine. For the fleet, this, too, could mean receiving a violation, a fine, and worse, being subject to an onsite investigation by government regulators and other potential headaches and surprises.
To put it in bottom-line perspective, in 2015 (the latest year for which there’s data) the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) levelled nearly $34 million in fines on more than 4,300 carriers, ranging from less than $500 to more than $100,000 for an average fine of a little more than $7,800. For fleets, a fine is only part of the equation — no matter the amount, the headaches involved with the violation notices, onsite investigations, loss of business, etc. add up to a bigger hassle than keeping track of CSA status in the first place.
Estes Express Lines
Richmond, Va.-headquartered Estes Express Lines is a perfect example of the power and convenience of monitoring its drivers’ CSA status in real time. In 2012, the 77-year-old transportation solutions provider was tracking CSA status the old-fashioned way — combing through government websites daily and manually creating company-specific spreadsheets. The result? Too many drivers were still receiving violations.
To solve this ongoing problem, Estes adopted CSA Performer from SuperVision to better monitor drivers. And it worked. Estes’ fleet and risk personnel are now alerted if a driver has or will be downgraded, and is able to make arrangements to substitute a driver whose status is still current and help the driver who has or will be downgraded resolve the issue and get back in good standing and on the road.
CSA Violations Reduced
And it’s paid off. Estes estimates that CSA violations have been reduced at least 10%, since implementing CSA Performer.
With CSA Performer, fleet safety managers can monitor, benchmark, evaluate, and coach drivers thanks to real-time and monthly reporting. CSA Performer’s predictive modeling can help fleet safety managers identify drivers who may be at risk for a violation and be able to take a proactive approach to helping avoid it.
CSA Performer’s proactive driver management features include:
- Daily inspection, crash, and violation updates
- Monthly CSA fleet & driver updates
- Root Cause analysis on score factors
- Peer Group benchmarking and trend analysis
- Customizable workflow and scoring
- Extensive reporting and predictive modeling
As Estes’ experience demonstrates — real-time monitoring of MVRs and CSA scores brings specific benefits to your fleet operation no matter the size.