Your fleet accident management essentials

When it comes to dangers faced in the workplace, it might surprise you to read that driving vehicles is top of the list.

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With more than a quarter of all road traffic accidents in the UK involving someone who was working at the time, having a solid strategy for fleet accident management is essential.

To find out how to keep your drivers and assets safe on the roads, read our top 3 tips below.

1. Prevention

Prevention is better than cure – and that’s especially true when it comes to fleet accident management. Accidents can be extremely costly, so you should make sure that you take the following steps to prevent incidents from occurring:

Defect Management and Vehicle Maintenance

Unscheduled repairs and vehicle downtime are the costliest fleet management issues. But both can be avoided with thorough planning and routine maintenance through the use of a fleet maintenance programme.

Using a defect management system, you can schedule fleet inspections and create automated alerts for important maintenance events to ensure your vehicles never miss a service. With the right tools, your drivers can easily report any defects or issues as soon as they notice them.

Having a vehicle replacement programme in place can also help to avoid downtime, ensuring your team can keep driving forwards.

Check the weather

On average, around 22% of road accidents are caused by bad weather. So making sure your vehicles and drivers are ready for all conditions is vital.

Keep an eye on local weather reports and road closures to help avoid dangerous driving conditions, and make sure vehicles are always equipped with the correct aids, such as anti-freeze and ice scrapers for winter driving.

Ensure drivers are confident driving in adverse weather conditions and keep driver training up to date, making sure your team know the best safe driving practices.

You should also have policies in place for bad weather – such as additional fleet vehicle checks – particularly in winter or locations where poor weather is likely.

Train your team

Your drivers should have all the latest training necessary to ensure they drive as safely as possible.

Using fleet management software can help you to easily keep track of driver training requirements, licence checks and incident reports, and telematics software can collect information on how your team are driving when they’re out on the road.

This data will give insight into your drivers behaviour, helping to flag those who might need their skills assessing and more training implementing.

Zero Tolerance Policy

Did you know that using a mobile phone while driving makes you 4 times more likely to crash? When it comes to dangers like phone use, drinking and using drugs, it’s important to have a zero-tolerance policy – not only for the safety of your drivers, but also for the reputation of your company.

Communicate clearly to your drivers that distractions will not be tolerated and make it clear that incidents could result in penalties or suspensions.

2. Dealing with accidents

Unfortunately, despite preventative methods, accidents do happen. So it’s important that you have policies and procedures in place, to help you deal with any incidents as efficiently as possible.

Your team should be trained to report an incident as soon as it happens. Fleet management mobile forms apps can help by allowing your drivers to input information from the field, like geolocations and photos of any damage.

You can deal with downtime effectively by scheduling repair and maintenance work quickly using smarter workshop management software. Gain instant visibility over all the work being undertaken and use automated notifications to keep you informed about the progress of any incident reports.

3. Planning for the future

After an accident, everything circles back to prevention.

Your fleet’s accident statistics can be used to create reports that will help you understand the causes of accidents. This can help to inform your future prevention plans and ensure the same incidents don’t happen again.

Offering your team the correct information and training is a vital step towards lowering the reoccurrence of accidents. Accident rates have been known to reduce by as much as 38% after advanced training courses.

Keeping your accident data in one secure system with fleet accident management software allows you to revisit it and analyse it whenever you need. Find out more about smarter fleet accident management software here.