11/03/2015
The development of telematics technology to cover an increasing range of functions is helping businesses better understand how they are operating and how they can drive down costs and boost efficiencies.
At the same time there are other areas of running a business which are also benefitting from the in-depth reporting and analysis available from a telematics system, such as supporting a company’s duty of care commitments.
Greg Donovan, from RAC Telematics, explains how an employer can harness the power of telematics technology to ensure the health and wellbeing of their staff.
Duty of care covers a wide variety of initiatives that employers take to ensure the health, safety and wellbeing of their staff and this is particularly important if the staff are mobile or work remotely. Data provided from a telematics system can support employers in creating duty of care policies as well being able to monitor and measure the impact of those policies.
However, we often find that companies don’t realise the value of a telematics system in respect of their duty of care obligations until they’ve started to see real telematics data come in from within their own business. Telematics is often deployed as a tool to monitor and improve operational efficiency and performance. But many companies then realise that the data they are seeing from the fleet and its mobile workforce can be used to support the safety and well-being of their employees. So what you see is that the benefits of supporting duty of care may not have been the primary reason for selecting a telematics solution, but having started to see data and understand the potential, employers quickly adopt the use of telematics systems for this purpose.
An example as to how telematics supports duty of care is in keeping records for regulatory purposes, proving that businesses are meeting their obligations in the case of an accident. Reporting ranges from identifying how long lone workers are on sites of interest, working hours and late finishes, excessive speed, vehicle health, and alerts in case of accident.
Telematics supports a wide range scenarios that employers can act on to protect mobile and remote workers, thanks to the level of data coming out of a telematics system. But duty of care also extends to risk profiling and telematics can play a significant role here too. The RAC’s telematics solution produces driver benchmarking and driving risk scores based on telematics trip data. This information and scoring identify key areas where employers can deploy policies and training programmes to help keep their driver community safe.
At the RAC, we offer a telematics system which embraces both the operational and duty of care needs of our customers. Our platform monitors driver performance and highlights areas of risk. In addition, our advanced and unique crash detection technology can alert employers in case of accidents. Furthermore, we actively work with customers via our professional services team to help users across the levels of the business understand and manage the use of the telematics data.
Installing the technology is only the first step to taking full benefit of the telematics system. Users seeing the greatest benefits are the ones who have embedded the richness of the data into their daily, weekly or monthly routines.
