Driver Scorecarding: Is It Holding You Back?

Many fleets use manual scorecarding to evaluate the safety of their drivers. As an example of this, a fleet might say a hard brake earns a driver 2 points, while a minor backing accident might net them 10 points. If a driver hits over 40 points on a given month, they’re assigned training to correct their poor behavior.

While many fleets rely on a simple scorecarding system, the unfortunate truth is that these tracking systems have two major problems: They leave hidden risk disguised and nearly always include some level of bias.

Fleets have a firehose of data hitting them every day from the various systems they use to track driver behavior, from speeding and hard braking, observations from the highway and customer docks, alerts from in-cab cameras, and more. This firehose makes it impossible to identify the true markers of driver-risk that lie below the surface, resulting in inaccurate point values for most fleets’ scorecarding systems. With manual scorecarding, safety managers can quantify some of their drivers’ risk. But, they’ll never be able to catch all of it since risk doesn’t present itself in a specific incident or infraction—it’s usually hidden in particular patterns of incidents, timeframes, and nature, which a human could not begin to calculate by hand.

Fortunately, artificial intelligence (AI) has changed the way fleets are evaluating drivers for the better, with the Driver Watch List.

What Is The Driver Watch List?

The Idelic Driver Watch List uses advanced AI technology to evaluate a fleet’s risk, as opposed to a manual point system. It does this by following three steps:

1. Organize all of a fleet’s data through system integrations
2. Analyze that data to identify the patterns of driver behavior that correlate with a crash
3. Identify and rank the fleet’s drivers by their likelihood of being involved in a crash

Essentially, it does the work of a data analyst, but because it uses AI and machine learning (ML) technologies, it does it incomparably faster and more accurately.

Learn more about AI in trucking here

What Makes a Driver Watch List Better Than Scorecarding?

The Driver Watch List has three main advantages over manual scorecarding:

1. Manual scorecarding lets you track behaviors you already know are indicative of problems. A Driver Watch List finds behaviors you didn’t know were indicative of problems.
2. With manual scorecarding, managers determine how much a behavior contributes to a driver’s risk level based on a gut feeling. With a Driver Watch List, poor behaviors contribute to a driver’s Verified Risk Score based on how predictive they have been in the past and how they have correlated with that driver’s other records.
3. Not all accidents are created equal, but manual scorecarding treats them as though they are. For one driver, a minor backing accident might not mean much, but for another, it might be a significant indicator of risk. Unlike a scorecard, a Driver Watch List can assess risk based on each driver’s unique circumstances.

By analyzing a fleet’s data thousands of times over, a Driver Watch List can identify patterns of risk that no human could discover.

Through the same process, it’s also able to measure how predictive each risk-pattern is of a crash and weight driver behavior appropriately. This means that the Driver Watch List will not only tell you who is at-risk, but why they’re at-risk—allowing you to assign the perfect training to get each driver off the Watch List and back on the road safely.

For fleets looking to unlock the insights a Driver Watch List promises, this technology is more accessible than ever. The Idelic Safety Suite is the premier driver management platform on the market and has the only Driver Watch List that uses data from all your third-party systems. With the Idelic Driver Watch List, you can see which drivers are most likely to get in a crash, where their risk is coming from, and then assign training that meets their specific needs.

With Safety Suite, everyone can keep safety top-of-mind, and making it a priority doesn’t have to be time-consuming. Watch a 2-minute demo video and learn how you can simplify your safety here.