Using Technology and a Team Approach to Reduce Risk – Safety & Compliance

“it’s a path I don’t think I would have planned for myself, but trucking gets its hooks in you, and you sort of fall in love with it.”

After Joshua Moore graduated from Cumberland Law School in Birmingham, Alabama, he was looking for a job in estate planning or in government administrative law when he landed a position with a motor carrier safety consulting firm. For the next seven years, he jumped in with both feet, even getting a CDL permit and taking some diesel technician classes, to better understand the industry and not just the related law and regulations.

Birmingham-based Vulcan Materials Company, one of the country’s largest producers of construction aggregates and construction materials, was a client. In 2016, Vulcan recruited Moore to guide its DOT compliance and safety efforts.

There were some 4,000 trucks with multiple DOT numbers and a number of different business lines, from road construction to aggregate delivery and ready-mix concrete. Vulcan wanted to develop a more consistent safety program across its entire on-road operations.

One of the first things Moore did, and one of the things he’s proud of having accomplished, was implementing consistent driver standards across the board.

“You might think that might be an easy thing to do,” he says. “But everybody thinks their operation is special, that there’s some nuance to it, that there should be some exception. A lot of that was encouraging people, ‘Hey, this is where we need to be.’”

He also spearheaded the adoption of dash cams across the entire fleet. About five years ago, he says, “We said, we’re going to put cameras in every truck that is above 10,000 pounds GVWR across our footprint.”

Cameras are both forward- and driver-facing cameras for company drivers. (Owner-operators are just forward-facing.)

“We want to coach behaviors and encourage our operators to be as safe as possible,” Moore explains. “And we believe we can get ahead of different behaviors” using this technology.

“We believe, conceptually, that the line managers should be coaching, because they’re the direct supervisors,” Moore says. Unlike some companies where coaching is seen as only the safety department’s job, at Vulcan Materials, “We believe safety is everybody’s responsibility And so the operations team needs to be the coach.”

But, he says, “that means we need to be wise about how we approach that with our time and the capabilities of the system.”

Leading vs. Lagging Metrics

One of the biggest things he’s grappling with right now, Moore says, “is there’s just so much technology, and there’s so much data, and having a good understanding about how to use that data in making good business decisions. And those business decisions include safety decisions, because safety is a core part of running your business.”

He’s asking, how can his fleet and the industry move away from lagging metrics to leading metrics?

“An accident rate is an accident rate,” he says. “It tells me what happened. But if you’re focused on this giant accident rate, you’ve probably got other problems you need to solve.”

He wants to know how to use data to create leading indicators and allow the company to allocate its resources so its people can spend time valuably to make the biggest impact.

Moore is exploring how he could adapt an approach used in other company operations to identify and prevent potential workplace injuries and fatalities (PSIFs).

Traditional safety performance measures are after-the-fact metrics. For trucking, that might be the accident rate. For the workplace, it might be lost-time and total recordable incident rates. But by paying attention to activities with higher risk potential that involve circumstances that can lead to serious injuries and fatalities, a company can recognize conditions that are known to increase the risk of an incident and address them proactively.

“So you look at incidents, at near incidents, and you say, ‘What’s the potential [risk] of this?’” Moore explains.