I had the opportunity to attend the semi-annual meeting of the Direct Delivery Leadership Council (DDLC) in Minneapolis. If you are not familiar with DDLC, check them out here. This is a cross-industry group of risk and safety management professionals who share a significant exposure to local operation of vehicles in their risk profiles. If you have local delivery operations in your risk portfolio, this is a group that you should seriously consider joining and actively supporting! There is leading-edge thinking coupled with thoughtful action at work in this group; this is not just information-sharing!
This meeting started with a fantastic discussion of Human Factors Analysis and Classification Systems (HFACS). For more information on this system, initiated by the United States Air Force for the investigation of aviation incidents, see this site. The HFACS system is one that every safety professional and risk manager should be familiar with, as it is an excellent basis for both accident investigation and enterprise risk assessment. Jim Olson, VP – Safety at Republic Services, reviewed with the group the way Republic is implementing the HFACS system in their accident investigation process. The work being done by Jim and his team at Republic Services in this area is absolutely leading edge!
The group then went on to a deep dive into work around fatigue management, led by Susan Sawatzky of In-Scope Solutions. As the group examined fatigue as a key contributor to accidents and risk-behaviors, there was universal agreement that fatigue is a significant contributing cause of accidents in their businesses and that there is a need for guidance in identification and prevention of fatigue across the industries represented among DDLC members.
As the group dove more deeply into an effort to develop a business case for an aggressive fatigue management initiative, they discovered that there are no reliable historical data available that define the fatigue risk, or to set a baseline from which they can measure improvement once fatigue management practices have been defined and implemented.
This data quandary is not unique to DDLC member-companies or to the measurement of the fatigue risk among local delivery and service drivers. This is a common problem among risk and safety managers across the globe: the availability, depth and reliability of data that adequately identifies true causes at the micro level. No matter the analytical or reporting system that any company uses, the absence of relevant raw data, which can be transformed into meaningful and actionable information, is the key issue. Claim data doesn’t usually have the depth that is needed. It takes a well thought out investigative and classification process that is tied through technology to an analytics engine that will draw data from investigations, operations, claims, human resources and other data sets, to bring out the information that is needed to bring out the promise of HFACS, fatigue risk management and other loss prevention methodologies.
Jeff Gehrke is Ventiv's Chief Risk Technology Evangelist. Contact Jeff at Jeff.Gehrke@ventivtech.com or +1.720.445.9531. Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffjgehrke
