The External Safety System Compliance Auditor

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The External Safety System Compliance Auditor

Welcome to the tenth and final article in this series on trucking safety systems! This series took a dive into the components of trucking company safety systems and it will end with an article further describing the role of external safety auditors and their relationship with carriers.

An expression so common in auditing communities that I cannot ascertain the original source is “In God we trust; everyone else will be audited”. While humorous, this expression hints at an adversarial relationship between the auditing community and the community they audit.

This should come as no big surprise. Auditors are generally responsible for making sure people and organisations are doing what they are supposed to be doing and what they said they were going to be doing. Having someone check up on you can send a message of mistrust. Trust is important in relationships, and to have someone accuse you of not being trustworthy can feel deeply disheartening - even if the accusation is weakly implicit.

If people were completely honest and compliant at all times, there would be no need for audits. Alas, this is not the case, and so auditors serve a vital purpose in ensuring compliance with the laws that society deems important. Compliant behaviour and operations do not need to worry about audits; however, not worrying is always easier said than done.

From my experience in transportation safety, audits frequently dominate discussions when safety professionals gather. Auditors are often revered as gatekeepers: individuals who have tremendous power and godly insight into the world of safety and compliance. And in many ways, this reverence is just and deserved: the auditors I have known have been experts in their field, and since they represent the law they do operate from a position of power.

But, the mystery around an auditor’s role serves no useful purpose and should be dispelled. Auditors are professionals with a job to do, and learning more about what they do and where they fit in the bigger scheme of carrier safety systems can help audits feel less intimidating without downplaying their importance.

So with that, let’s talk about auditors.

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Loss Prevention Principles Across the Carrier

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Loss Prevention Principles Across the Carrier

Welcome to article nine of ten in this series on trucking company safety systems. Previous articles have focused primarily on examining parts of a carrier’s safety system and repurposing tools of compliance to better serve their organisation. In this article, I will get into the subject of loss prevention.

My goal in doing this is to explain how loss prevention principles can be applied to aspects of a carrier outside of roles directly related to safety and compliance. Once the benefits of adopting a loss prevention mindset can be seen in all parts of the company, it is easier to see how health, safety, and compliance can be fully integrated into a carrier’s operations.

In the world of safety, loss prevention is the practice of using systems and measures to reduce and prevent the loss of life, health, and property from incidents and accidents [1]. I’ll expand on this definition by including loss of reputation; incidents that do not result in any health, life, or property loss can still cause damage to a business through negative impacts to the business’s reputation. Just think about a social media video depicting a commercial truck with a highly visible company logo driving improperly in a public place without any incident - in such a case, the carrier’s reputation takes the hit, not the bumper.

When it comes to loss prevention and, in general, modern occupational health and safety, Frank E. Bird is considered one of the most influential figures to have contributed to the profession [2]. Many safety professionals today are familiar with one of his greatest works, Practical Loss Control Leadership, and this textbook serves as the first place many people learn about risk matrices, incident investigation methodology, and other health and safety principles [3].

The reason why I am mentioning Bird’s Practical Loss Control Leadership is because of the way the text discusses safety as an organisational objective. There are certainly better texts that can provide carriers with specific guidance for safety-related tasks like collision investigation, but what I find so noteworthy about Practical Loss Control Leadership is that it is not overtly written for safety professionals but is, instead, written for all types of company leaders.

This is an important distinction between this text and newer ones. Nowadays, the safety program at a company is often under the leadership of a safety professional and may be somewhat siloed from the rest of the organisation. I recommend anyone in a position of leadership read Practical Loss Control Leadership because it frames safety and loss prevention principles as areas of knowledge that can benefit all leaders, not as specialised knowledge that only belongs to the safety director.

In the following sections, I will describe how loss prevention and safety principles can be applied to other personnel divisions within a carrier (like operations and management). The purpose of doing so is to show that these different parts of an organisation can work together and operate on similar principles: principles that will not only protect the health and safety of workers and other road users but principles that will protect the carrier from loss in all of its unwanted forms.

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The Role of a Vehicle File in the Carrier Safety Management System

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The Role of a Vehicle File in the Carrier Safety Management System

Welcome to article seven of ten in this series on trucking safety systems! After starting this series by looking at the roles systems play in organisations and dissecting parts of a carrier’s safety systems, I will now discuss ways in which mandatory vehicle files can be leveraged for greater control over the carrier’s preventative maintenance program.

Vehicle files, like driver files, are compliance requirements for carriers in Alberta [1]. Their purpose is to record important identifying information about the vehicles operated by the carrier and to serve as proof that the carrier has a functioning maintenance program.

Carriers concerned only with compliance will begrudgingly maintain vehicle files only out of an interest in performing well in a future audit. And there is some value in going no further than basic compliance: for example, the requirement to respond to notices of defect (ie. recalls) from vehicle manufacturers can lead a carrier to reduce their risk considerably depending on the nature of the defect.

But, maintenance records provide immense opportunities to control costs and improve uptime, and in order to do so, a carrier needs records and the ability to analyse data. The basic vehicle file lays a foundation of compliance on which more elaborate systems of maintenance management can be built. In the following sections, I will provide a quick overview of the record requirements in an Alberta-based carrier’s vehicle file, and then describe ways in which these records can be used to improve the maintenance system.

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The Role of a Driver File in a Carrier’s Safety System

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The Role of a Driver File in a Carrier’s Safety System

Welcome to article six of ten in this series on trucking company safety systems! Up to now, we have discussed the importance of taking a systematic approach to achieving compliance and improving safety, examined the role different people play in safety systems, and dived into specific arms of the overarching carrier safety system.

This article will describe the role that driver files play in the safety management system of a carrier. While the maintenance of accurate and up-to-date driver files might be viewed as nothing more than an exercise in basic compliance, there is more to driver files than meets the eye.

Driver files are a tangible representation of a system. Multiple roles and processes mesh to produce the ordered collection of data contained within a driver file, and by auditing driver files, safety system efficacy can be assessed. This is part of the reason why compliance audits - both internal and external - examine the contents of a carrier’s driver files: missing documentation is indicative of failures throughout the safety management system.

Many carriers spend considerable time on maintaining driver files, and the driver file is sometimes thought of simply as a place where documents go to wait for some uncertain future audit. It is true that these files are repositories for important documentation that forms an important part of a compliance audit, and I will provide a short section on the minimum items required in a driver file in Alberta. However, my main focus here is to shift such a mentality to one where driver files are seen as a valuable resource from which important data can be extracted to guide and improve operations.

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Trucking Hours of Service Management Systems - The Key Actors

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Trucking Hours of Service Management Systems - The Key Actors

Welcome to article five of ten in this series on trucking company safety systems! Past articles in this series have explored the roles of systems in trucking companies, and have also dug into some of the specific purposes safety management systems have at trucking companies.

In this article, I will be examining parts of the carrier’s safety management system that are used to manage compliance with hours of service (HOS) regulations. My intention here is not to tell the reader how to manage HOS compliance; instead, I want to show the reader the different roles within the overall management system, that not all of these roles are under the control or even influence of the carrier, and that all of these roles provide valuable input for the system.

But first, let’s briefly describe the differences between HOS management and fatigue management.

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Carrier Occupational Health and Safety Systems: The Key Actors

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Carrier Occupational Health and Safety Systems: The Key Actors

In the trucking industry, companies frequently segregate compliance requirements with National Safety Code (NSC)-related legislation and OHS legislation. Many companies ignore their OHS responsibilities and focus on NSC; for companies that strictly operate over-the-road fleets and don’t have their own facilities, OHS may not seem as important as the on-road safety elements for the company.

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Carrier Maintenance Systems - The Key Actors

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Carrier Maintenance Systems - The Key Actors

In this article, we’ll take a closer look at the maintenance system in a carrier and how it relates to safety and compliance. While a preventative maintenance program is an important part of ensuring equipment remains reliable and repair costs are controlled, well-maintained vehicles are also safer to operate than their neglected counterparts.

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