Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
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How you manage CSA will depend on the size of your operation. Use data to learn where it discriminates in favor of large or small carriers and avoid a bad score, which increasingly holds the potential to sink your business BY TODD DILLS B ased on analysis of data from the first two years of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration's Compliance Safety Accountability program, 20 percent of carriers now have a ranking in at least one of the seven Behavioral Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories that make up the Safety Measurement System component of CSA. That's a marked improvement over the 12 percent – determined by CCJ – that was cited widely in the program's early days. Data sufficiency standards in the BASICs Given their higher exposure, the largest carriers are from two to 30 times more likely on average than single-truck independents to have a score above an intervention threshold depending on the BASIC. But large carriers aren't the only ones that find themselves in CSA's crosshairs. NOTE: All BASICs require at least one violation or crash to have occurred within the past 12 months to meet standards to register a score. Inspections affect small carriers The average CSA score for all of the smallest carriers is abnormally low because most small carriers have no public score. Of close to 470,000 carriers with U.S. Department of Transporta- UNSAFE DRIVING: 3 inspections with a violation CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES/ ALCOHOL: 1 inspection with HOURS-OF-SERVICE COMPLIANCE: 3 inspections VEHICLE MAINTENANCE: with a violation DRIVER FITNESS: 5 inspections with violations CRASH INDICATOR: 2 crashes BASIC violation 5 vehicle inspections with BASIC violations HAZMAT: 5 placardable vehicle inspections with BASIC violations tion operating authority, fewer than half have any SMS data at all, according to recent estimates by Dave Kraft of Qualcomm. Just less than one fourth have a few inspections – but no SMS ranking or "score" in any BASIC. But when they do garner enough inspections to be rated, smaller carriers showing public BASIC scores on average receive negative (higher) scores. EDITOR'S NOTE: Working with CCJ and Overdrive publisher Randall-Reilly Business Media's RigDig Business Intelligence unit, we analyzed inspection and scoring data at the end of the Compliance Safety Accountability program's second year since going live in December 2010. Here we report the results of that analysis, offering insights into enforcement patterns and what you can do to keep your business in the clear. COMMERCIAL CARRIER JOURNAL CCJ_0313_BusinessFeature.indd 59 | MARCH 2013 59 2/20/13 1:11 PM