In 1788 the first ever health and safety legislation - to protect chimney sweeps - was introduced in the United Kingdom. Since then the breadth and complexity of health and safety legislation has advanced considerably. Several countries have, or are revising their health and safety legislation as the cost of poorly structured legislation or low engagement from businesses on health and safety can be significant.
Studies demonstrate investing in health and safety correlates with improvements in productivity, efficiency, staff wellbeing, recruitment and retention while minimizing losses and costs. The combination of which delivers a significant competitive advantage to businesses and a country’s economy.
EROAD is a leading provider of health and safety compliance services, including vehicle management, driver behavior and performance measures.
Despite New Zealand’s health and safety efforts, in 2010, 29 miners died in the Pike River mine explosion. This was followed shortly after by the deaths of 185 in Christchurch’s 2011 6.3 magnitude earthquake. Significant shortcomings of New Zealand’s then health and safety laws were identified and this led to a fundamental shift in its legislative framework culminating in the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 (HASWA). New Zealand’s legislation now closely aligns with the framework adopted in Australia’s model law and brings it closer to the United Kingdom’s health and safety laws.
HASWA requires persons conducting business or undertakings (PCBUs) to manage health and safety risk, including those upstream and downstream of the supply chain. Proactive, preventative risk management prioritizing elimination rather than minimization is at the core of the legislation. Directors and officers have responsibility for proactive due diligence, utilizing up to date information on the business activity, risk and controls to ensure the PCBU complies with its duties.
Risk management, while not being an exact art, requires information enabling risks to be identified, assessed and controlled. Simple sustainable risk based health and safety systems, generating employee value, wide participation, strong leadership and supported by corporate governance are central to the sustained success of health and safety management within a business.
Analysis into the transportation sector shows that compliance is a major focus of the industry to ensure that it is safe and professional. However carriers, particularly smaller operators, are struggling to manage the implementation of new health and safety laws which explicitly include vehicles as being a workplace.
EROAD’s telematic solution provides essential information and oversight of carriers’ operations to assist them to meet their legal obligations.
Driver behavior is the greatest single cause of vehicle incidents both on the road and within worksites. A third of road incidents in the United States and New Zealand are believed to be work related.
A blend of information, instruction, training and relevant experience supports the finding that someone is competent to operate a vehicle. Supervision is a necessity before a driver’s competency has been assessed and assured.
EROAD’s technology enables carriers to remotely supervise their drivers and provide management with diagnostic information and trending of individual driving performance. This can be utilized to assess ongoing levels of competency in order to support drivers to continually improve driving standards.
Drivers, as employees, have a legal responsibility to ensure their own and other’s health and safety. Business owners have a responsibility to support them in this duty.
The latest research on the use of telematics to improve driving behavior concludes that the immediacy of time between a driver failing to observe safe driving standards and receiving feedback is key to changing driving behavior.
Supporting business owners and drivers to improve driver behavior is what drives EROAD in its ambition to deliver a safer road network. By providing a wide range of driver safety solutions including instant in-vehicle driver feedback, supervisory alerts supporting drivers with feedback on their return and in-depth driver insight reports, EROAD enables a sustainable drive for continual improvement.
Analytics can distil complex and detailed data into key information which can deliver improvements in driving performance. By having greater insight into driving behavior it allows motor carriers to train and support their drivers to improve road safety. Such improvements can also lead to better motor carrier safety ratings (including the Operating Rating System (ORS) in New Zealand and Compliance, Safety and Accountability program (CSA) in North America), which leads to a safer and more productive road network.
The importance and power of analytics should never be understated and EROAD’s technology utilizes analytics to identify drivers who are at risk of infringing the law. The ‘at risk’ driving group can proactively be given the opportunity and support to improve their driving behavior allowing the carrier to manage its risk effectively.
EROAD’s products and services are an important component of a carrier’s health and safety framework. EROAD’s products and services can help to:
Embracing new technology for vehicle inspections supports cost efficiencies, improves assurance levels, minimizes liabilities and reduces vehicle downtime. A vehicle which has faults or is out of its service period delivers a liability, instead of value, to a transportation carrier.
The Achilles Heel of any inspection system is a reliance on human behavior. A sustainable solution needs to be simple, owned, accepted, managed and deliver a quality step-change to the people that the system relies on to conduct them.
EROAD has become a leader in developing such user-friendly systems which meet the needs of drivers and companies. Read EROAD’s red paper to review the issues a vehicle inspection system needs to address in New Zealand.