Editor’s note: This is part 1 of a 5-part series on the evolution of big data analytics in trucking. Future installments this week will cover topics that include driver scorecards, data warehousing, video safety systems and market intelligence.
On October 8, 2015, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration finished a compliance review of Mesilla Valley Transportation (MVT). The agency planned to issue an unsatisfactory safety rating on Dec. 15.
Hours-of-service violations led to this crisis despite MVT using electronic logs for more than 18 months. The FMCSA required a quick plan of action to issue a conditional safety rating.
MVT was already using its data warehouse and robust business intelligence (BI) applications to deliver timely information to executives and managers. The focus of the IT department now turned towards safety and compliance.
Employees in the safety department were searching the FMCSA portal and sorting through hundreds of daily e-mail alerts from its electronic logging devices to find violations, says Mike Kelley, chief information officer of the Las Cruces, N.M.-based carrier with 1,350 power units.
Today, an eight-member team in the safety department monitors a single web page from their desktops. The web page shows a consolidated view of compliance information with built-in workflow tools to take specific actions when violations appear.
Users can quickly determine what party is responsible — the driver, fleet manager, customer, etc. — and take corrective actions, he says.
With the new technology, HOS violations at Mesilla Valley have decreased 10 to 15 percent every month. In March, 2016, violations were down a total of 67 percent since October, 2015.
Data used by transportation firms is increasing at exponential rates, but so is the speed, power and intelligence of their information systems. Instead of reviewing what happened in the last month or even yesterday, companies are using modern business tools to deliver predictive and prescriptive information on what to do right now, to front-line users.
First things first
Prior to the recent project at MVT, individuals in the safety department were overwhelmed by email alerts coming from its electronic logging devices, says Russ Burns, senior developer at MVT. Alerts began coming when drivers had one hour of remaining drive time in their duty cycle, but this was no cause to intervene.
In January, 2016, Mesilla Valley received approximately 17,000 alerts but only 2,500 needed an immediate response, he says.
Burns developed a program to categorize the alerts. The most critical appear in the compliance web page, in real time. As an example, a driver that has run out of hours but is still moving needs to be stopped immediately and an investigation completed, he says.
MVT is in the process of adding other critical event data to the web portal to take action on speeding alerts and risky driving behaviors.
The next time FMCSA auditors come to the office, “we want to be able to field an entire report for all violations, with a record showing when the company intervened, the actions taken, and the results,” Kelley says.
Part 2 of this series (tomorrow) will showcase new apps that are putting the power of big data in the hands of drivers.