McConnell Dowell reduced speeding, accidents and fuel costs
McConnell Dowell reduced speeding, accidents and fuel costs
Dealing with large-scale construction projects across a broad range of industries, McConnell Dowell’s objective is to deliver what they promise to customers, while protecting their people, the community and the environment. By having EROAD as their telematics partner, they’ve improved safety “in a major way”.
McConnell Dowell is an Infrastructure Company specializing in construction. Safety is one of the core values at McConnell Dowell, and Simon Batchelor, Fleet & Procurement Manager credits EROAD for helping the company make some big improvements to the safety of their fleet.
Changing behaviour behind the wheel
Since installing EROAD in 128 of their light vehicles in New Zealand in 2016, Simon has seen real improvements in driver behaviour “EROAD’s improved safety in a major way because our drivers are now aware of the overspeed events so they’ve all slowed down”.
The visibility of speeding events, through real-time feedback with Drive Buddy as well as weekly reporting has changed the way McConnell Dowell’s drivers think about their driving, “On a weekly basis a report is generated and sent out to each of the project managers and several of the projects are now actually having competitions within themselves to see who can become the number 1 driver” says Simon.
Fewer speeding events, fewer accidents and lower fuel costs
Getting drivers to slow down is a great win for the team, and Simon has seen the impact it has on other key metrics too. “EROAD has impacted our business in a beneficial way. It’s brought down our overspeed events from approximately 25,000 overspeed events a month to about 1200. And it’s reduced our overall fuel bill by approximately 20% and a similar reduction in accident/ incident events by 20% as well”
Better fleet visibility
As well as improved safety and reduced fuel costs, Simon says EROAD is giving him better visibility of the fleet too “We know where our drivers are at any given time”, says Simon. Something that’s important not only for ensuring safety of their drivers, but also helps with managing the fleet.
“Our vehicles are pool vehicles, and each driver has to enter a PIN number which is unique to themselves so we can then track down which driver was using a vehicle at any particular time.”
Driver exoneration
Anyone who’s been involved in an accident before knows that when it comes to insurance claims, it can be one person’s word against another, but with EROAD you can be confident you’ve got the data you’ll need. When one of the team had an accident, Simon was able to use EROAD data as evidence for the insurance company, “We had a claim come against us to say one of our drivers had been involved in an accident and we were liable for it, and with the use of EROAD we could prove that driver was nowhere near the location at the time. And the insurance company actually took EROAD data as proof that we could prove that our driver wasn’t there,” adds Simon.
Simon talks about how EROAD has helped McConnell Dowell: https://www.eroad.co.nz/nz/truckstar?name=Simon+Batchelor
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