Balfour Beatty Utility Solutions is investing millions of pounds to ensure it has one of the safest fleets on the road.

To help it achieve this aim, the company has deployed two innovative systems – RiskMaster and GreenRoad’s G-unit monitoring device.

Working in tandem, the solutions use a range of data to determine when a driver is high risk, allowing the company’s dedicated insurance and risk team to intervene and prevent incidents occurring by sanctioning driver training.

“RiskMaster allows us to get an upfront picture of where the risks lay with our drivers,” says Brent Mitchell, director of operations support, Balfour Beatty Utility Solutions (BBUS).

“But by using it in conjunction with the GreenRoad system – our ‘near miss’ tool – we’ve been able to clearly identify where the risks lay and how we can target them appropriately.”

Minimising driver risk is central to Balfour Beatty’s group-wide Zero Harm initiative, which is designed to create an environment where there is no risk of any kind to the public, zero risk of fatality or serious injury to the workforce and zero risk of long-term health damage by 2012.

But Mitchell told Fleet News that there was no “silver bullet” to minimising risk. Instead, he divides driver risk into three distinct areas: the driver; the vehicle; and the journey.

He says: “We had a degree of knowledge about our drivers, but the risks were not completely visible and counter measures were not particularly well targeted. We needed a complete picture.”

The company was looking for a risk management system that would be capable of identifying a risk at an early enough stage to allow for a proactive intervention.

It decided on the RiskMaster system from Fleet Support Group because it combines DVLA licence checking and driver online risk assessment, while point scoring all events.

But BBUS worked closely with Riskmaster’s IT team to develop the product further so that it would integrate with a telemetry system.

This allows BBUS to quickly identify the risk of an individual both in historical terms and real time behavioural trends.

“Crucially, RiskMaster is a live organic process, which works in tandem with GreenRoad to update risk rating depending on contemporaneous driving practices,” says Mitchell.

Prior to the initiative being rolled out last year, BBUS was effectively running about half-a-dozen different tracking systems because of amalgamations and mergers over the years.

However, none of those systems were able to provide the desired level of data on driver risk that it was looking for.

All the systems reported on date, time, speed and location, but GreenRoad’s ability to analyse and report on up to 120 different aspects of driver behaviour was of particular interest to the company.

“It enabled us to drill down and discover what the real issues were,” says Mitchell.

An in-vehicle LED display provides instant feedback to the driver, using the same traffic light system as RiskMaster.

Driving infringements are recorded against a driver’s GreenRoad profile, with the total number per day divided by driving hours to give a safety score.

If a driver is classified as ‘red’ or ‘amber’ based on a day’s driving, 10 or five points respectively are added on to his/her RiskMaster profile.

This cumulative process means that, while drivers may initially be granted a ‘permit to drive’, if standards slip intervention can occur.

BBUS takes an equally comprehensive approach to its vehicle fleet. Following assessments, it placed an order last year with Mercedes-Benz for nearly 700 Sprinter vans.

The Sprinter has a number of proactive and reactive safety features, including adaptive brakes and brake lighting, multiple crumple zones and driver and passenger airbags.