Fontana: An opportunity to reinforce the importance of inspections
We are about to see some significant changes to the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s Compliance, Safety, Accountability Safety Measurement System. Although a date for these changes has not yet been set, it is not too early to start preparing your staff for them.
I won't go into too much detail about the changes; you can read about them in this FleetOwner article. But I do want to touch on a few things.
Maintenance violations—which I think fleets can influence by the rigor of their maintenance and inspection programs—will be divided into two categories. The categories are vehicle maintenance and vehicle maintenance: driver observed. The second focuses on problems FMCSA thinks drivers should have found during pre-trip inspections.
Even the best preventive maintenance program won’t protect you if your drivers sleepwalk through their pre-trip inspections. Things can go wrong on the road and between PM services, so your drivers are your best line of defense for spotting developing problems.
In light of this change to CSA, I suggest we all do some refresher training on how to conduct a pre- or post-trip inspection. As with any repetitive task, it can be easy to become complacent when you are doing it repeatedly. I think that is true for all of us, not just drivers.
One idea is to look at your recent CSA violations to spot trends and then focus training on the areas of the vehicle that are getting the most violations, because those areas need a little more attention.
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One way to make the training more interesting is to turn it into a competition of sorts. Much like they do at some of the technician challenges, you can “plant” violations on your tractors and trailers to see if the drivers find them. This could be something like squirting oil on the back side of a tire to imitate a wheel seal leak, deflating one steer tire, or removing one lug nut. Ask drivers to perform a pre-trip inspection on this “modified” truck to see if they find the faults.
Or you can gamify things by hiding notes at various inspection points. If the driver does not bring the notes in to exchange them for company swag or coupons for meals at local eateries, you’ll know that maybe they aren’t as diligent as they could be in completing their pre-trip inspections.
The goal is to find a more interactive, entertaining way to get drivers refocused on performing top-notch pre-trip inspections.
In addition to reminding the drivers of the need to be diligent when completing both their pre- and post-trip inspections, you need to ensure that your technicians are acting on issues brought up in the driver’s Driver Vehicle Inspection Reports. If your technicians aren’t taking driver DVIRs seriously, drivers will likely get frustrated and stop reporting on what they find. Make sure to have technicians close the loop on the DVIRs so that drivers have closure on what work was completed, the problem not found, or the repair delayed for a non-safety-related issue when the part needed to be ordered and replaced in the future.
You’ll also want to make sure someone on your team is well-versed on the other changes to CSA surrounding points for violations, recent violations, intervention thresholds, etc.
The change to CSA is a good reason for fleets to revisit their inspection and maintenance processes to improve safety and vehicle performance.
