Usher Transport reduced accidents by 32% with Motive.

Discover how a smarter dash cam empowered one company to improve its coaching program and reward good drivers.

Overview

Usher Transport is a fourth-generation, family-owned company. The company has been in business for over 75 years, with a focus on hauling hazardous materials, bulk lubricants, and oil. Headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, Usher Transport operates across 11 U.S. terminals. Its operations also span into Canada, where drivers typically haul bulk oil across the border multiple times a week.

Usher Transportation’s EVP of Safety and HR, Beau Mosley, joined Usher Transport in 2018 as the company was looking for a compliance solution. Mosley was familiar with Motive from a previous company and recommended Motive as the easiest-to-use system to manage compliance. With an intuitive device installation and world-class customer service, it was a no-brainer. But as the company grew, Mosley wanted to take Usher Transport’s safety game to the next level.

32%

fewer accidents

Challenge

Usher Transport was previously using a standalone dash cam provider for its safety program. These incumbent dash cams posed a few problems for Usher Transport:

  1. Cameras were not integrated with an engine-connected gateway device to track events like hard brakes. This meant that Usher Transport only got half the picture of what was happening on the road with drivers.
  2. Dash cams did not pick up on high-risk behaviors to notify the Usher Transport team about who to coach and which behaviors to coach about.
  3. Because of the lack of visibility, Usher was only able to use the existing dashcams for exoneration.

Using an integrated fleet management platform as its operating system was mission-critical to Usher Transport’s next level of growth.

“Having dash cams for exoneration was a way to protect our business from a reactive standpoint, but one of the huge holes we had in our program was the ability to take a proactive approach to coaching,” says Mosley. “We needed a camera solution that would give us those insights, and was also integrated with our ELD compliance product.”

Usher Transport relied on anecdotal feedback to know who to coach and what to coach them on.

“The main goal for a safety program is changing behavior and driver coaching,” continues Mosley. “For us, it was tough to gauge anybody’s behavior besides looking at violations, negative citations, and collisions. Which are all data points that happened AFTER the dangerous behavior.”

That’s where Motive stepped in. “Motive allows us to be proactive about changing behavior,” explains Mosley. “Of course exonerating my drivers is key, but even more important is getting ahead of high-risk behaviors to prevent that crash before it occurs.”

Motive empowers us to objectively identify risk and change behavior on the front end, rather than the back end.

Beau Mosley, EVP of Safety and HR, Usher Transport

Solution

Now, Usher Transport relies on facts. The Motive Safety Hub, powered by Motive’s Safety Score, gives Usher Transport the intelligence they need to proactively take action with drivers.

The Safety Score evaluates driver performance over time for an accurate measure of driver risk to generate never-before-seen insights into driver behavior. These insights are available in Motive’s Safety Hub, where Usher Transport’s safety department can immediately take action.

With the combination of our Vehicle Gateways, Smart Dashcams, and Safety Hub, Usher Transport’s safety department can automatically pinpoint who to coach and which behaviors to focus on. The Motive Safety Score can determine the true risk profile of a driver.

“As a carrier, we have different responsibilities for the public and doing our part in keeping our roads safe. We need to be able to identify those high-risk driver behaviors proactively instead of reactively,” explains Mosley. “I’d say the best thing about all of it is that Motive gives us the ability to objectively identify risk and change behavior on the front end, rather than the back end.”

With this type of visibility into where risk lies, Usher Transport can take the necessary steps to proactively modify unsafe patterns before a crash occurs. And the numbers speak for themselves. Usher Transport has decreased the total frequency of accidents in its fleet by 32% annually.

Usher Transport is not only coaching current drivers to grow the company’s annual accident reduction rate beyond 32%, but is also onboarding future drivers with the same videos and insights from Motive to proactively get ahead of the safety curve.

Results

Usher Transport uses Motive’s technology to help its business run safer operations. There are three use cases for how our safety solution helps to enhance Usher Transport’s existing safety program:

  1. Out-of-the-box risk framework: Many fleets resort to building their own internal models to establish risk profiling. Instead, Usher Transport uses Motive’s Safety Score and Smart Dashcam as a turnkey infrastructure to help power driver risk identification. Safety Score helps remove a lot of the busy or ineffective work, like identifying who to coach or what to coach them on. When that process can be automated, Usher’s team can focus on the highest impact work, like rewarding and coaching.
  2. Automated risk identification: With Motive’s Smart Dashcam and Safety Score automatically pinpointing Usher’s high-risk drivers, the company can quickly take action to get in front of coaching specific behaviors as soon as possible. “Now, we’re getting those alerts in real time. Plus, having a camera that shows us all those near misses and identifies the riskiest behavior is key to taking action with drivers,” says Mosley.
  3. Powerful driver retention programs: It’s important to show appreciation for drivers so they understand how critical they are to the business. Highlighting drivers that are doing well, or drivers that have made significant improvements to their behaviors, is an easy way to promote a culture of safety.

“We use Motive as a coaching program to better ourselves,” says Mosley. “Many of the videos we have captured are now part of our orientation program. We take them, we share them, and we learn from our mistakes. It’s a win-win.”

Usher Transport has a program called FOCUS — “Focus On Cultivating Usher Safety.” It is based entirely on driver performance from Motive and is tied to categories like preventable collisions, hours of service (HOS) violations, speeding violations, and more. If drivers have any violations in any category, they lose their bonus for that quarter.

“There are thousands of ways Motive helps to enhance our FOCUS safety program: coaching opportunities, collision reduction, frequency reductions, injury reductions, and bettering our CSA scores,” shares Mosley.

Because Motive’s fleet management platform is integrated, Mosley can get the full picture of what’s happening in his fleet when it comes to safety. With the ELD compliance data and driver safety data from Usher Transport’s drivers available in one place, Mosley’s team can break down the data silos that would normally prevent them from running safer and more efficient operations.

This visibility not only helps the safety department make better decisions. It also leads to impactful company-wide ROI. One of the best parts about the visibility Usher Transport gets is in the form of lower insurance premiums.

“If we can proactively get involved and prevent those negative behaviors, it leads to lower insurance premiums at renewals. That money saved on insurance is cash I can help invest toward other areas of our business,” concludes Mosley.

“I feel good about what we do,” shares Mosley. “Motive is the perfect complement to our robust safety program. Their technology automatically pinpoints where we should be focusing our time and attention — which means my team can be more impactful in doing our #1 job: making our fleet safer.”

The testimonials, statements, and opinions presented on this webpage reflect the real-life experiences of individuals and/or companies who have used our products and/or services. Individual results may vary and past performance is not a guarantee of future results. The testimonials presented on this webpage were voluntarily provided and not paid.

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