LAS VEGAS. Looking to leverage the ever-growing collection of truck and driver data to improve highway safety above and beyond the capability of current federal government programs, Vigillo has launched the Vigillo Enterprise platform and announced on Sunday a new partnership with J.J. Keller.
As Vigillo Founder and CEO Steve Bryan explained at a press briefing during the American Trucking Assns. Management Conference and Exhibition here, the 3.5 million roadside inspections and the reports they generate are only a small fraction of the truck-related data that’s available through modern telematics systems, driver training programs, and other sources.
“If we can connect enough of these pipelines, we could be looking at something more along the lines of a billion observations a year on the trucking industry, compared to 3.5 million,” Bryan said. “We can now tie the observable unsafe practices of drivers—the critical event data such as hard braking, lane departures, speeding—with what we have from the CSA side, from the roadside inspections, and we begin to put together a diagnostic on that driver."
But Vigillo, which has made a name in the trucking industry through its mining and analysis of Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration roadside data, does not generate any data itself and so, Bryan explained, Vigillo is developing partnerships with service providers who do.
The first, with compliance specialist J.J. Keller, will provide a new Prescriptive Analytics Solution designed to identify unsafe behavior in drivers and assign appropriate training.
The system uses the data that Vigillo routinely gathers from over 500,000 truck drivers to diagnose driver behavior that may lead to unsafe operations. For example, CSA violation data is combined with critical event data from on-board technology to create a more complete profile of driver behavior. The resulting map of risky behavior is then matched with subject matter from the extensive J. J. Keller Training On Demand library of interactive driver training courses to remediate those unsafe behaviors.
“Identifying training opportunities, then deploying a training solution virtually in real time, is just another example of taking the power of data and turning it into actionable solutions,” said Bryan.
“This partnership taps into our companies’ core strengths—safety training for J. J. Keller and data mining for Vigillo — to improve driver safety,” said Rustin Keller, executive vice president & COO of J. J. Keller. “And that’s really what it’s all about.”
Similarly, Bryan explained, drivers who have completed training programs can be tracked and the efficacy of each program can be evaluated, using pre- and post-training on-road performance data.
“In my mind, what we’ll ultimately tie this back to is we’ll stop killing 4 thousand Americans in truck accidents every year,” Bryan said. “Safety is our wheelhouse. We’re not spending a whole lot of time trying to save carriers fuel—that’s valuable, and there’s lots of people who do that—but we are trying to figure out the safety angle. Until we can brake the information silos down and begin to get all of this data organized in one place, we're never going to get the view on the driver that we need.”
