Public, private and voluntary sector fleets are being urged to adopt a new online benchmarking tool, designed to improve their at-work road safety whilst minimising operational costs and boosting business efficiencies. Backed by the government's Department for Transport (DfT), the tool is being delivered as a contribution to the work of the Occupational Road Safety Alliance (ORSA) by the team behind the Driving for Better Business (DfBB) campaign and in collaboration with a number of other fleet organisations. The free tool will collect data on processes in place to manage work-related road safety from fleets of all sizes and types and measure their success. It is due to be officially unveiled at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents' (RoSPA) Road Safety Conference on Wednesday 2nd March in Stratford-upon-Avon. Adrian Walsh, director, RoadSafe, which leads the government-backed DfBB, said: 'Benchmarking can be a highly effective way of improving road safety in a corporate setting, knowing what is being done well helps to maintain momentum, but equally important is for fleet decision-makers to understand what can be done better. 'Identifying good practice comparing it across organisations is enormously valuable and encourages often simple but innovative solutions to what may appear to be complex problems. 'There is no doubt that by benchmarking, employers can develop sound business cases to identify where to invest to improve road safety. 'Participating organisations will be able to identify areas of concern and draw on the knowledge and expertise of other employers that are excelling in that particular aspect of safe fleet operation, thus helping to drive continuous improvement, innovation and promote a shared responsibility across work-related road safety. 'In developing the online tool, we have heard from numerous organisations that there is little understanding of where to start collecting road safety data, what information to collect and how best to analyse and interpret the information once they have it. 'This benchmarking solution is designed to assist these processes by proving standardised methods through a secure online platform.î It is hoped that this solution will be a real step forward from the existing system: Interactive Driving Systems' Fleet Safety Gap Analysis, which asks 10 online questions to fleets to benchmark their responses against all other participating fleets; providing an insight into the safety of an organisation's vehicles, its drivers and how they rank against other organisations.
