What is Continuous Driver Monitoring?

Other than maybe an office party on your last day before retirement, you don’t want any surprises as a motor carrier Safety Director. 

You definitely don’t want to be the last to know that one of your drivers has racked up points on his or her license — especially if that person ends up in an accident. 

That’s why manually pulling MVR reports once a year is not merely a mundane task on your list of many things to do, it’s a process that’s filled with holes: 1). You have to track and remember to do it on time, and 2). There is a visibility gap. All you really know is the driver was good to go the last time you pulled the report. You have no idea what’s happened between now and the date of the last report pull. 

At AvatarFleet, we recommend an automated approach to complying with driver monitoring requirements. Known as Continuous Driver Monitoring (CDM), this method automatically tracks changes to state MVRs in real time, including personal vehicle liability and administrative suspensions for things like not paying child support. 

Like a Roomba vacuum, you can set up CDM to run in the background while you take care of other important parts of your job, like filling empty seats. 

The goal, as always, is improving safety, reducing risk, ensuring your driver qualification files are 100% compliant and doing everything in your power to avoid being on the wrong end of a letter from a plaintiff’s attorney about a multimillion dollar lawsuit against you. 

How Continuous Driver Monitoring Works

With AvatarFleet, you can opt in to continuous driver monitoring thanks to A-Suite’s integration with SambaSafety. 

SambaSafety is a software platform that acts like a professional tattletale. It connects to state departments of motor vehicles to keep watch for driver mishaps and alert you when your drivers receive violations that ding their MVRs or Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) scores. 

Through a feature called Roster Sync, any new hires or terminations in A-Suite will be added to SambaSafety’s platform automatically. From there, you can toggle on or off each driver you’d like to be enrolled in CDM. 

There are several schools of thought on who is best to monitor continuously vs. once a year. For instance, we definitely recommend CDM for all full-time drivers, but you may not need to continuously monitor drivers who only hit the road periodically (maybe that’s you as the Safety Director). 

Regardless, without a continuous monitoring solution, Safety Directors have a 364 day blindspot when pulling MVRs manually one time per year. Let’s say you pull a driver’s MVR annually on Jan. 1 and it’s clean. What if he or she has a violation on Jan. 2? If your driver doesn’t fess up, you won’t know about it until the following Jan. 1. In the meantime, your company is shouldering the risk of potentially putting an unsafe driver on the road.

With continuous monitoring through SambaSafety, you’re notified about any driver violations immediately in A-Suite. 

Benefits of Continuous MVR Monitoring

There are obvious safety benefits to knowing about any driver violations ASAP. According to SambaSafety, companies that monitor with their solution experience up to a 14% reduction in crashes within the first 12 months, a 32% reduction in monthly violations within 12 months and a 77% violation reduction after 12 months of using monitoring and training. 

Beyond making the roads safer, continuous driver monitoring makes meeting the mundane (but required) compliance part of your job much easier. 22 states accept continuous driver monitoring in place of pulling annual MVRs. Again, this saves you time and eliminates the potential for human error that comes with tracking and pulling MVRs manually. 

Additionally, SambaSafety normalizes the MVR data, making it easier to get the vital information you need at a glance. The rules, regulations and reports differ across all 50 states, so SambaSafety worked with insurance and transportation industry leaders to come up with a standardized color-coded scoring system. This method clearly illustrates which drivers are clear (green), which have some activity (yellow) and which have severe violations that need immediate attention (red). 

If you decide to forgo continuous driver monitoring or you want to go belt and suspenders with CDM plus annual ordering, you can still benefit from automating the process. You can set up A-Suite to automatically order MVRs several days, weeks or months before they expire, and you can also order pre-hire MVRs through the platform. 

In any case, A-Suite’s integration with SambaSafety gives you several ways to ensure you’re doing everything in your power to be in compliance, mitigate risk and avoid surprises when it comes to your drivers’ records. CDM gives you peace of mind and ensures defensibility in the event you end up being deposed for a lawsuit. 

To learn more about setting up continuous driver monitoring with A-Suite, review clips from our webinar with SambaSafety or reach out to your AvatarFleet Client Success Manager.