How AI increases driver safety at Cascade Environmental.

Learn how smart dash cams help prevent accidents, improve behavior, and boost compliance.

Overview

Cascade Environmental is a field services contractor that partners with clients to provide seamless environmental and geotechnical solutions, from concept to completion.

Over the last 25+ years, Cascade has grown from a Northwest U.S. regional drilling company into a national, full service organization offering innovative solutions for every step of clients’ projects.

Challenge

Uncovering unsafe driver behavior

Every fleet safety program has one central mission: to make our roads safer. But anyone who’s been in the business of operating general commercial vehicles long enough knows this is easier said than done.

For Cascade, the lack of detailed insight into driver behavior was a blind spot. In an industry where reputations are everything, Cascade needed a way to protect the business by ensuring drivers were adhering to the high-quality safety standards laid out by the company.

This lack of visibility caused a few challenges for the Cascade fleet safety team. They didn’t know which drivers to coach and what specific behaviors to coach them on, unless an incident occurred — making the job of safety managers more challenging concerning driving behaviors. This meant their management was not coaching as effectively as they could be. Alex Amort, Cascade’s VP of Compliance, knew there had to be a better way.

“Initially, our thought for a dashcam was designed around intervention, but our findings showed some additional improvement opportunities,” explains Alex. “We were looking for a way to target our coaching efforts, and help make our drivers safer.”

That’s where Motive stepped in.

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.

First, the Motive Smart Dashcam can detect high-risk behaviors from Cascade’s drivers while they’re out on the road, and instantly notify the safety department to step in.

“Motive’s Smart Dashcam helps us understand what unsafe behaviors drivers are engaging in, so that our team can immediately step in to help change them,” explains Alex. “This proactive approach to driver safety is mission-critical to preventing collisions for our business.”

Second, Motive’s Safety Score helps Cascade understand just how risky driver behavior can be. The Safety Score evaluates driver performance over time for an accurate measure of driver risk.

What sets the Safety Score apart is the advanced controls that allow managers to fully customize the weight of each behavior, or exclude certain behaviors entirely, to better manage their safety program. Drivers also have full visibility into how they are scored, with a detailed breakdown of behaviors available in the Driver App.

“With the Safety Score, we were able to zero in on a particular group of drivers whose scores were less than satisfactory. This initially was utilized to focus the dash cams on potentially higher-risk drivers. The Safety Score allowed our team to proactively prompt drivers to be safe,” said Alex.

By using artificial intelligence to unlock the data collected from the Smart Dashcam, Motive’s technology is able to generate never-before-seen insights into driver risk and behavior.

“What’s great is that we can see those insights from the camera and from the risk profiling readily available in our Safety Hub,” says Alex. “We’d normally have to spend hours and hours sifting through footage and playing guesswork. Now, it’s all right there at my fingertips. Motive automatically pinpoints who we should coach, and what to coach them — making my team insanely more effective.”

The result is a safety solution capable of improving driving behavior and reducing accidents better than any other vendor on the market.

“Did I mention the image quality is amazing too?” adds Alex. “All I can say about the dual-facing Smart Dashcam is WOW! I am impressed, especially with the clear night vision technology. The dash cam can quickly and easily detect bad driving behaviors in low light and automatically tag them for my team to review, which is incredible. This helps save us hours of sorting through footage, and lets us take immediate action to coach behaviors before an accident happens.”

Results

Increasing safety and efficiency

As a national field services company, Cascade consistently has to meet and exceed the safety requirements and expectations of its clients.

“Following all driving and safety requirements was not anticipated to be a safety concern prior to rolling out Motive’s Smart Dashcams,” says Alex. “That level of basic safety was simply expected of our professional drivers. But in recent weeks, we’ve discovered some opportunities for improvement in policy compliance. We discovered that many drivers were not complying with all company policies while driving. I quickly learned that you can’t fix what you can’t see. With this new visibility, we see the opportunities for improvement. And now we can address them head-on.”

Thanks to Motive’s Smart Dashcams, Alex and his team have video quality high enough to quickly determine if any policy violations are occurring. Automated video tagging allows them to zero in on this behavior — without having to sort through hours of footage manually — so they can coach drivers to fix this behavior immediately.

For a fleet of more than 700 vehicles, this represents a tremendous opportunity to improve safety and mitigate risk.

“If our drivers pull up to a site and they’re seen violating our company’s or our clients’ policies, it puts those accounts and our business at serious risk,” adds Alex. “Identifying these behaviors so we could help change them was a crucial step for improving our fleet safety program.”

Cascade has changed 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.

“Our safety interventions started as generic responses to singular incidents, which made our training efforts less effective,” explains Alex. “Now that we have the full picture of these incidents, we can recognize what our drivers did correctly and incorrectly based on the conditions of the road. We hone in on specific instances and use the footage as trainable, real-life examples in our training program. As a result, our interventions are much more focused and ultimately more successful. We help our drivers form baseline assessments of their performance with Motive, and focus on helping them boost their results.”

Thanks to Motive’s technology, Cascade’s safety department will continue to proactively address high-risk driver behavior — and make adjustments before accidents occur.

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