Fleet Management News & Business Info | Commercial Carrier Journal
Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/815349
commercial carrier journal | april 2017 57 PHILLIP ADAMS Nussbaum Transportation CEO Brent Nussbaum, left, and Jeremy Stickling, director of human resources and safety, led the company's efforts to leverage event recorder and ECM data to measure driver be- havior and retool its fuel scorecard program. from drivers. Stickling admits the scor- ing system, which took mpg results and added weighted point adjustments to normalize the results, was too complex for drivers to track and still left the com- pany guessing as to what was causing poor fuel economy performance. "We were asking drivers to try a new habit or driving skill, but there wasn't anything concrete to point to," says Stick- ling. "The suggestions we gave them were assumption-based. It might have been something they already were good at." CHANGING BEHAVIORS In 2015, Nussbaum began looking for a way to affect fuel economy by mea- suring driving behaviors and habits. "We didn't have any real insight," says Stickling of the old fuel scorecard. "We were waiting until somebody had a way to get us the data to measure hab- its reliably." At the same time, Nussbaum was weighing its options for onboard event recorders when it came across Smart- Drive. The company told Nussbaum its system tracked g-force sensor data and could be tied directly to the ECM and allow access to throttle usage and speed management data. After rolling out the onboard event recorders fleetwide – a carefully managed process that resulted in only one of the company's 315 drivers leaving – Nuss- baum collected three months of data points and looked for reliable patterns be- tween driving behavior and fuel economy. Stickling's team identified four key areas – speed management, smooth driving,