Fleet Management Enhancement

Background

FleetMentor is a site that is designed to help fleet managers oversee day-to-day operations of their transportation company.

Some of the existing features on this site included:

  • Fuel Tax Calculation
  • Vehicle Maintenance Schedules
  • Random Drug Test Recording
  • Driver Management
  • Self-Entered Inspection Recordkeeping

CSA 2010 Initiative

Arguably, the most important responsibility of a fleet manager is to ensure that their drivers and the carrier as a whole are in compliance with government regulations while on the road.

To facilitate this, the government created the CSA 2010 initiative. This initiative was designed to give drivers and carriers a “score” on their driving record and vehicle maintenance.

FleetMentor already had features for managing driver inspections, vehicle inventory and maintenance, but now it needed a way to integrate CSA data from the government into the site.

Driver Inspection and Vehicle Management

CSA Carrier Scores

In December of 2010, the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) released the long awaited carrier scores. The scores setup baselines for a companies current standing and shortcomings with the DOT. Both carriers and drivers were scored on the same Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories (BASICs). The BASICs are:

  • Unsafe Driving
  • Hours-of-Service (HOS) Compliance
  • Driver Fitness
  • Controlled Substances/Alcohol
  • Vehicle Maintenance
  • Hazardous Material (HM) Compliance
  • Crash Indicator

Wireframes

After definitions of data columns were determined, simple wireframes were put together. The main focus of the wireframes was to determine what, if any new patterns existed. The goal was to maintain existing patterns as much as possible and to create new patters only when absolutely necessary.

Technical Challenges

Most carrier data was made available through a DOT API. Driver data was much hard to come by and needed a 3rd party vendor to provide the dataset on a monthly basis.

Certain pieces of carrier data also had to be acquired through a risky technique called screen scraping. The process that did the scraping was monitored for errors to ensure data was properly acquired.

Completed FMCSA Scorecard

Carrier score card and overall reporting statistics were delivered with very few changes to existing patterns and used code functionality that had previously existed. One significant enhancement was to the primary scorecard report. This report was more graphical than previous reports in FleetMentor and offered users a stronger visual to present to their company.