Ensuring that drivers are accountable for their driving behaviours is essential if your organisation is to implement a vehicle use policy. A policy around vehicle use sets expectations that all organisations should strive to meet, but it’s only effective if the policy is measured against outcomes.

Without accurate identification of drivers to support policy adherence, there is a danger that your fleet is only paying lip service to the intent of the policy.

There is also the question of your organisation’s duty of care responsibilities. Government legislation considers the vehicle to be a place of work, with your responsibilities extending beyond ensuring that vehicles are safe to use to include whether drivers are using them safely.

Improving driver behaviour is most successfully achieved when your strategy includes initiatives that focus on the individual alongside measures to improve the overall driving culture in the organisation.

Driver identification allows you to accurately associate a driver with particular driving events and highlight were driving behaviours need improving.

You can also create scorecards that illustrate good and bad driving behaviour, leading to an overall improvement in behaviour across all drivers.

Strategies such as ‘gamification’, where improvements are encouraged between teams, will avoid the negative consequences of a name and shame approach, and instead bring a sense of collective responsibility to the cause of fleet-wide improvement.

Attributing the costs associated with vehicle use is an important exercise if your fleet is servicing a number of different projects, or you have multiple departments with access to fleet vehicles. A pool booking system such as PoolCar is one of the best ways to achieve this, but if you don’t have this solution, accurately identifying the driver and the journey timeframe is a good option.

Information is the lifeblood of business decision making, and if your operations depend on vehicles knowing who is driving and when can provide important insights.

An example of this could be a fleet that is involved in customer site visits. Knowing that Employee A used a vehicle on a particular day to visit a site and retuned with still four hours left in the day, highlights a productivity opportunity. Without driver ID, you would have to review vehicle logs and combine them with worksheets. Identifying the driver combines duration, location and the skill set of that employee in one information source.

With driver identification, you can review time spent travelling to jobs and the time actually spent on site and use that information for invoicing, productivity forecasting, and job roster creation. All of which will help your fleet operate more profitably and productively.

Accurately identifying a driver is the first step in moderating bad driving behaviours such as harsh breaking or cornering. These generate excessive wear on tyres and increase maintenance requirements. Accurately identifying the driver is an effective way of addressing these issues.

Vehicle servicing is a significant cost factor in fleet operations and everything you can do to reduce the wear and tear on vehicles is to be encouraged.

Accurately identifying the driver of a vehicle puts you in a position to identify whether the best use of fleet assets is being made. For instance, you are failing to operate a fully optimised fleet if drivers are using an SUV when a cheaper-to-run-saloon is sufficient for the journey.

Driver identification can also build into a rich historical record of which vehicles are being used the most, highlighting those vehicles that can be retired or replaced.
There are fleet management tools and vehicle booking solutions that will do an excellent job of helping you to optimise your fleet, but with or without these, driver identification is going to be an essential element in your fleet optimisation strategies.

The public’s perception of your brand can be heavily influenced by how they see your drivers behaving on the road. Aggressive driving, speeding or discourteous behaviour can all generate complaints that need addressing. But resolving these issues becomes difficult if there’s uncertainty about who was driving a particular vehicle at the time. In these situations, driver identification is an essential element in protecting your organisation’s reputation and reinforcing the expectations you have of your drivers.