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" width="185" height="244">Driver training is a subject dear to my editorial heart, but I fear we don't do it well enough. For one thing, the focus of training is almost always on making sure truck pilots don't “go agricultural” too often, or infinitely worse, whack the aged librarian's Toyota.
Safety is obviously paramount, but there's more to it.
Think fuel economy.
The PIT Group in Quebec, Canada, recently released a driver-training effectiveness study exploring the true value of driver monitoring and coaching to address bad habits and reinforce efficient techniques. PIT is a research and engineering outfit focused on improving truck spec'ing, maintenance, and operations practices. It has both supplier and fleet members, many of them in the U.S., and it often works with NACFE, the North American Council for Freight Efficiency. It operates a full-bore test track north of Montreal.
PIT's study suggests that training to promote driver fuel efficiency and safety is only effective if it includes refresher courses to reinforce good practices and address weaknesses.
“While vehicle technology designed to improve fuel economy continues to advance, driver training is the element that has the largest impact on fuel consumption,” says Yves Provencher, director, market and business development, at PIT Group. “Our studies show that various ways to train drivers, including classroom, in-cab, and simulator training, all have their advantages.
“However, the lessons and techniques they teach don't last without monitoring behaviors,” he continued. “Providing refresher training and in-vehicle coaching technologies that address bad habits and reinforce effective skills is what's needed to maintain and improve fuel-efficient and safe performance.”
In one study of long-haul operations, PIT compared 47 control and 38 test drivers before and after simulator training that focused on things such as road and engine speed, acceleration, and more. Baselines were established over two months before the 38 test drivers were ...Read the rest of this story
The Mega Millions lottery reached its fourth-largest jackpot in history last week at $450 million. The sole winner is 20-year-old Shane Missler, who announced his win on Facebook with three words: "Oh. Missler is a Florida resident and is taking the lump sum of nearly $282 million.
Once you've mastered the basics of analyzing data, go beyond canned reports to unlock the doors to greater efficiency and profitability.
">P&S Transportation has always been data-driven, but the tools available today make it much easier for people throughout the organization to gain valuable insights from data without being IT experts, says Mauricio Paredes, vice president of business technology for the Birmingham, Alabama-based 1,300-truck flatbed carrier.
Generating reports from data can help provide business-critical information to fleets of all types and sizes, but such reports can be frustrating to compile and tedious to set up. Creating layouts with trends and graphical information can also be time-consuming. And static reports only give one dimension of data.
Peredes says the canned reports offered by most transportation management software only go so far. That's why it's important to move beyond traditional data analysis into what's called business intelligence, or BI.
“If you want to see a particular number by a different dimension, a different qualifier, BI tools allow you take a number and slice it by other dimensions,” Paredes says. “So we were able to take tractor revenue number and slice it by dispatcher, for example, so it made it much easier to follow people's hunches about why a number was the way it was.”
P&S uses McLeod Software's products, including McLeod IQ, which gives customers the ability to access and analyze data from its LoadMaster, PowerBroker and other software using Microsoft Excel or other popular reporting tools.
“Canned reports, they give you a snapshot in time of what's happening,” says Jonathan May, director of business intelligence at McLeod Software. “But we wanted to be able to provide trends, do analysis; you can make forecasts looking at previous historical trends. Those kind of things.”
As the company describes it, McLeod IQ “uses the Microsoft Business Intelligence stack to create a ...Read the rest of this story
