Travis Perkins boosts driver safety

One of these initiatives is the Driver of the Year award, an annual nationwide competition open to all drivers in all businesses across the Travis Perkins Group. The competition aims to identify and acknowledge the organisation’s safest driver. More recently, the company has introduced a Group-wide ‘Safer Roads’ policy to further improve driver safety awareness and identify drivers who require additional coaching.

In order to introduce these initiatives, Travis Perkins needed a way to accurately monitor and record the behaviour of its drivers and determine those who are exhibiting the best driving performance across the group.

This information needed to be available in real-time, to promote and enable improved safety and driver awareness ‘on-the-job’, as well as being recorded in highly detailed retrospective reports. With thousands of drivers across the organisation involved in both initiatives, these reports needed to offer the functionality to drill down into individual driver performance, as well as providing top-level visibility into overall trends in order to develop ranked league tables.

The focus on safety awareness associated with the Safer Roads initiative meant that fleet and HR managers also required a system that could highlight individual driver habits, such as harsh braking, speeding or idling.

Working very closely with a Masternaut consultant, the Travis Perkins Group has developed both initiatives with the help of intelligence generated by Masternaut technology.

For the Driver of the Year award, a shortlist of suitable drivers is drawn from each Group business before benchmarking these drivers against each other during an intensive two-month monitoring period. This period relies heavily on Masternaut’s telematics systems to monitor each driver against set criteria in order to compare driver performance. Each criterion carries a certain weight, and Fleet and HR managers can modify the emphasis placed on a driver ‘event’, tailored to the particular business requirements of that business or Division.

Similarly, the Safer Roads initiative also uses data provided by Masternaut technology to identify drivers that show signs of requiring one-to-one coaching.

All information generated by Masternaut is transmitted from the vehicle in real-time, as well as being compiled into reports which are delivered back to the Group’s Head Office for full retrospective analysis.

Together, the two initiatives have led to a significant increase in health and safety awareness and driving best practice across the Travis Perkins Group, and helping to improve the safety of the organisation’s drivers and other road users. Those exhibiting habits such as speeding, idling, harsh braking and accelerating are quickly identified so that the appropriate ‘on the road’ coaching sessions can be arranged with one of the Group’s 16 dedicated risk assessors.

As well as receiving formal coaching, drivers also receive real-time training via Masternaut’s in-cab light bar, which instantly alerts the driver when they need to alter what they are doing – whether they need to slow down or brake less harshly.

As a result, accident figures over the last five years have reduced.

Using Masternaut’s technology as the backbone for these initiatives also means that, where previously HR policies around driver safety monitoring and training were very siloed to particular divisions or areas of the business, the whole organisation now has one consistent, consolidated approach.

Richard Horton, head of transport development, Travis Perkins says: “The ‘Driver of the Year’ and ‘Safer Roads’ are two examples of initiatives based on Masternaut’s technology which go way beyond straight forward vehicle tracking. The two initiatives are allowing us to raise awareness of driver safety, and the importance of responsible driving across the business – from HGVs through to light commercial vehicles.

“Our drivers are not only more conscious of how they are performing behind the wheel, they’re motivated and incentivised. When the Driver of the Year award comes around each year there’s a great sense of healthy competition among the whole team.”

Travis Perkins is the UK’s largest supplier to the building and construction market, with a national network of more than 1,900 branches and annual turnover of £5 billion. It uses Masternaut’s technology across its 3,000-strong commercial fleet.