Take Control of Your Fleet’s Safety with Drivewyze Safety+ Custom Alerts

Drivewyze Safety+ is the trucking industry’s foremost proactive safety platform.

It helps fleets communicate with drivers before potential driving hazards are on top of them – giving drivers time to slow down and react to the road ahead. But, it’s more than safety alerts. Safety+ can also be customized, allowing fleets to develop their own alerts and messages through the portal’s easy to use geo-fencing capabilities. This gives fleets a new realm of possibilities in communicating with drivers.

What’s more, data is easy to view, thanks in part to the Drivewyze Hub. This portal gives safety managers insight on how drivers react to safety alerts and custom messaging. And, it provides the information needed to provide coachable moments, while also showing overall trends in the effectiveness of proactive messaging.

The Challenge

For fleets, the challenge is finding safety programs that truly make an impact and that are welcomed by drivers.

Programs should be measurable to ensure accident/citation rates are declining. And a program should be customizable to allow fleets’ the ability to make an impact on a “problem area” that is unique to their operation.

The Solution

Proactive in-cab notifications for upcoming road hazards; the ability to create custom safety notifications; and a portal to track driver behavior and then coach drivers based on results, have helped countless Drivewyze customers.

All fleets are unique. In-cab messaging — specific to the fleet through Safety+ custom alerts — can help foster better and safer driving practices. Until recently that’s been a challenge and not commercially available. That was until Drivewyze created Safety+.

Custom alerts through Safety+ have been beneficial for many customers, including Western Express, a fleet with more than 3,600 power units. The company has created more than 350 custom zones with alerts, 300 of which are at customer sites. Likewise, C.R. England, with more than 4,000 tractors, has created numerous custom alerts. For these two companies and many others, it’s helped drivers navigate everything from bad weather conditions to areas where speed violations can be a problem, to driving accident-free through customer loading locations.

The Result

Companies like Western Express and C.R. England have reported significant improvement in safety, thanks in part to Safety+. In a 24-month period, for example, Western Express achieved a 22% improvement in its accident rate. It has meant lower claims costs, repair bills (Western Express has its own repair facility), insurance rates, and better customer service – the company has won numerous Carrier of the Year awards from its customers.

Over at C.R. England, the company has come close to cutting in half its chargeable accidents per million miles over a four-year period. C.R. England attributes much of that success to the company’s ability to leverage technology — Drivewyze Safety+ and dashcam technology — to assist with its overall safety programs.

Western Express: With Drivewyze Safety+, custom notifications are set up by Western Express when they notice any “hot zones” where incidents might take place. Part of the safety program at Western Express is an in-house IT system to track everything related to safety. “We can then deep dive to see where the issue is,” said Daniel Patterson, Western Express’ director of safety. “We can even identify patterns based on the lane, or the customer. This information is powerful and allows us to implement added safety measures – such as custom messages to our drivers to corral the problem.”

To illustrate, Patterson said that speeding has been curtailed thanks to the Drivewyze Safety+ geo-fencing technology. “Roads are mapped, and trucks are governed based on the speed limit in all areas. Year-over-year, we’re down 20% on speeding citations.”

When law enforcement conducts roadside inspections, Western Express wants to ensure its drivers comply. “In
the past, we’ve had inspection sites come up fast on our drivers and they missed pulling in for a brake check as an example. That’s cost us a citation for ‘failure to obey a traffic control device.’ Now, when we know of an area where there is an inspection, we’re quick to add a custom alert through the Drivewyze portal.”

Patterson said that in flatbed hauling, each customer has its own protocol. “We will have instructions in our load notes, but with Drivewyze, we can create geo-fenced reminder messages that ensure our drivers follow customer protocols. Some might require our drivers to wear hard hats or have steel-toed boots when on site. We have one customer that requires ice cleats to be worn in the winter. And, load securement is critical, so we may create messaging for difficult loads. All of this helps us reduce injuries from slips, trips and falls. What’s more, if a customer has a drop box for a bill of lading, we can remind the driver of this as well. These custom notifications really help our drivers and helps us stay in compliance with customer requirements.”

C.R. England: Colin England, C.R. England’s director of accident prevention, said the ability to develop its own custom driver alerts, through the Safety+ platform, is what has the company sold on Drivewyze Safety+. “We use custom alerts in a variety of ways,” he said. “At a customer location in a small town as an example, we were continually nicking our trucks on a building in a tight corridor. We put in a custom alert, so when any driver neared that area, they paid more attention. We haven’t had an incident since.” Speed is another risk factor when it comes to accidents for fleets, and it’s no different at C.R. England. Data from the Drivewyze portal has shown that a driver that receives a speed violation alert is twice as likely to slow down than one that doesn’t.

“We’re being very proactive in this area as we know speed is a major influencer in accidents,” said England. “Through Drivewyze and our camera system, we have two ways to coach drivers. With Drivewyze we can geo-fence areas of concern and see how individual drivers react. We can grab a screenshot from the Drivewyze portal and show performance to a driver – it’s a coachable moment. Likewise, with our camera system, we can use video footage and data from our camera system to coach our drivers and help them improve.”

With its major hub in Salt Lake City, where winter weather can be dicey, C.R. England was also an innovator in creating custom weather alerts. According to Gerardo Granados, who is part of C.R. England’s safety department management team, bad weather is every fleet’s enemy.

“When we started using Safety+, we took advantage of geo-fencing for weather. We began to identify our busiest lanes – providing our own weather alerts for our drivers, taking info from the National Weather Service, and other sources. The alerts were well received, and they provided ‘foresight’ – minimizing risk for our drivers is something we’re always trying to do. Drivers have a tough job with traffic, weather, and delivery windows. Anything we can do to help them, we want to do.”

In 2022, Drivewyze added Severe Weather Alerts to its Safety+ package. “That’s been a great complimentary tool that we use, along with our own custom weather alerts,” said Granados. “Weather can turn on a dime, so the more information we can feed to drivers to prepare them, the better.”

England and his team continue to probe new ways to improve safety and the custom alerts through Safety+ help them do that. For example, they’re looking at adding lane restriction alerts to help make sure drivers never get caught in the wrong lane which could lead to a citation. “We’ve done a great job of reducing our accident rate over the past several years,” concluded England. “That’s a credit to the technology we’re using, the drivers and staff we’ve employed, and our company’s culture. We plan to continue that.”

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