Cascade Environmental protects its fleet while saving 800 hours per month.

Challenges

Improving driver safety & compliance

When Cascade Environmental partnered with Motive, its main goal was to gain more detailed insight into driver behavior and find opportunities to improve compliance and safety across the board.

“We wanted to be able to identify driver issues, apply a metric to it, measure business units against each other effectively for performance, then start to change driver behavior,” explains Gary Crueger, Cascade’s COO. “If a driver is speeding, hard braking, or not wearing a seatbelt, we’re able to immediately engage with the driver at the point of infraction. That’s really powerful.”

Gaining a single view of fleet and spend management

Before Motive, Cascade had to hire a small team of people to generate reports from different systems, enter that information into spreadsheets, then make sense of the data. It was a huge lift, and it added a lot of extra time and labor.

Alex Amort, vice president of risk and compliance, explains how complicated IFTA filings used to be for the company.

“All of the drivers had to fill out reports every day, listing how much fuel they’d bought and how many miles they’d driven in each state,” he says. “Now multiply that by several hundred drivers and factor in the administrative staff we needed to verify all of them. We’d have to calculate everything to come up with the IFTA report.”

Building a better tomorrow, today

Committed to sustainability, Cascade wanted to fuel its sustainability journey with better planning, action, and evaluation. 

Cascade needed a reliable way to measure the impact of things like idling before it could proactively correct any issues. With better data, Cascade is able to understand the impact of driving behavior on equipment while delivering on its commitment to environmental stewardship and social responsibility.

“Idling is a huge expense,” says Ken Allen, Cascade’s director of fleet maintenance. “Not only does it waste fuel, it leads to additional vehicle maintenance and reduces vehicle life expectancy. Also, by reducing idling, you’re reducing the amount of emissions being put into the atmosphere.”

Solution

Taking a proactive approach to driver safety

By implementing Motive’s best-in-class safety technology, Cascade was able to supercharge its safety program. Now, safety managers can proactively coach drivers on unsafe behaviors, thereby preventing accidents.

“Driver coaching isn’t just about encouragement,” Crueger says. “It’s about practice, application, tracking, monitoring, and getting feedback from the field as well. Motive’s tools have helped us produce the optimum safety program and replace reactive measures with preventative ones.”

Amort adds, “Motive AI Dashcams help us understand which unsafe behaviors drivers are engaging in so that our team can immediately step in to help change them. This proactive approach to driver safety is mission-critical to preventing collisions for our business.”

Unified platform to manage the entire fleet ecosystem

Motive’s fully unified Integrated Operations Platform powers operational efficiencies throughout Cascade Environmental. The company has 800 ELDs deployed to automatically and accurately log driver activity.

Having one central source of truth has resulted in huge time savings, especially on previously time-consuming activities like driver trip reporting mandated by the International Fuel Tax Agreement (IFTA).

Crueger says, “We can connect the dots with data and insights from Motive to make better and more proactive decisions about our fleet and for our drivers. We don’t have to analyze information from multiple systems, which speeds up everything we do.” 

Cascade also enhanced visibility into driver activity and saved costs by switching from a traditional Mastercard to the Motive Card.

This move unlocks direct savings at the pump, on maintenance, tires, and more through the Motive Card partner network. It results in overhead savings, because the Motive Card connects directly to the app and the wider Motive ecosystem, reducing redundant data entry. The Motive Card’s built-in fraud controls also help Cascade battle fuel shrinkage and boost fleet fuel card security.

“Now we have the Motive Card integrated with the app, we’re able to obtain true, documented, direct savings to the bottom line. Everything from Motive really does work together as a full package,” says Alex.

Data insights fuel profitability and ESG initiatives

With all data interconnected, Cascade’s fleet managers can use the Motive Fleet Dashboard to analyze problematic trends like long idling events. They can easily view and generate reports with details like the driver, vehicle, location, start time, total idling time, and more.

Cascade fleet managers can then use this time to coach behavioral change that saves money and complies with ESG policies.

Allen says, “I believe it’s making an impact because they also see the need for maintaining our equipment and reducing emissions. We are starting to see groups that have reduced their idling to a point that we can use them as an example of how to keep other areas in compliance with our expectations.”

Results

+50% CSA score improvement

Cascade has revolutionized its approach to driver safety. Previous coaching recommendations were generic due to lack of visibility, and now they’re tailored—and proactive—thanks to Motive’s technology.

“We saw not only compliance increase but an immediate reduction in incident activity and severity. Using Motive tools like the dashcams and the ability to communicate directly in real-time with drivers has enabled us to pivot proactively,” says Crueger.

Cascade now consistently meets and exceeds the safety requirements of its clients, as well as local and federal compliance regulations. Having concrete data at its fingertips has also empowered Cascade to make changes that resulted in dramatic improvements to its last few CSA scores as assessed by the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Admin.

Crueger adds, “Since bringing on Motive, we’ve seen a 50% improvement in compliance and safety. The additional capabilities that we’ve unlocked have been extraordinary in shifting our culture back to one that puts safety first.”

800+ hours/month saved on compliance reporting

For the first time ever, Cascade’s safety, operations, and finance teams can manage their drivers, vehicles, equipment, and fleet-related spend in one platform. Now, they have the real-time and location-based fleet visibility and intelligence they need to make informed decisions.

As a result, Cascade has implemented several efficiency improvements. The resulting time savings and accuracy improvements are felt throughout the organization, but perhaps nobody felt it more than Cascade’s drivers, who now save hundreds of hours per month.

“When we switched to using Motive to complete IFTA reports, we calculated time savings of more than 800 hours a month just from trip reports,” Alex explains. “Additionally, on our last state of Oregon routine fuel tax audit, the data from Motive for the selected months had zero errors in it, compared to previous months’ manual data entry which had mistakes that had to be fixed retroactively.” 

By integrating the capabilities from the Motive Card, Cascade has further enhanced its already excellent safety program and gained instant cost savings on multiple levels while also mitigating the risk of fraud.

Sustainability that scales

As Cascade Environmental plans for the future, Motive is proud to support its journey and power the company’s growth goals and ambitious ESG initiatives.

Allen says, “The next step is using Motive to identify how much fuel we’re burning, calculate the emissions from that, and how that factors into maintenance and upkeep costs. We’re always looking for ways to keep employees, the public, and the environment healthy.”

Crueger adds, “Motive is unique and special as a partner because of their engagement and responsiveness. We’ve witnessed the constant evolution of technology, all of which adds value. The Motive Card is a great example—it gives us real-time data relative to emissions and fuel savings that we can report with integrity through our ESG reporting. Motive is supporting our growth initiatives on multiple fronts.”