Prudential Overall Supply cuts cell phone use by 97% and unidentified trips by 95% with Motive

Challenge

Before adopting Motive, Prudential faced significant challenges in fleet management and driver safety. Facing a DOT audit, the company lacked a strong safety culture and the staffing to support it. The business was operating under the premise that it was strictly a laundry business, instead of a trucking fleet that delivers laundry. As a result, Prudential lacked many of the essential components that keep fleets in compliance, such as driver qualification files. Many of Prudential’s processes were done manually, making everyday tasks cumbersome and time-consuming. 

“When I first got here, we didn’t have any kind of database,” says Corporate Fleet Specialist Dina Eidinger. “The company was using an Excel spreadsheet to track things. Every time somebody updated something, we’d add another row. We really needed to automate our processes.” 

Though Prudential had electronic logging devices (ELDs), the devices weren’t user friendly. Staying on top of compliance was difficult, and reporting was unreliable. The ELDs became a bigger issue during Prudential’s DOT audit, where the inefficiency of the devices really came to light.

“Our ELDs functioned so poorly that the DOT turned their focus to the vendor and away from us,” Eidinger says. “The auditor was trying to pull up our logs but couldn’t get the logs off the website. The system was so old-school, we had to call the support team for help.”

Prudential onboarded dash cams about four years ago, monitoring hard braking, hard accelerations, and hard cornering, but nothing beyond that. In the years since, Eidinger has worked to strengthen Prudential’s safety culture to better support drivers and Prudential’s business. Corporate Fleet Manager Chris Mata came aboard last year. Together, he and Eidinger have worked to build a safety culture worth emulating.

Solution

Switching to Motive marked a shift in Prudential’s approach to fleet safety and compliance. Since then, Prudential has significantly reduced unsafe driving behaviors and accidents. Now when incidents occur, they’re minor. Prudential’s laser focus on safety has enabled the company to avoid catastrophic accidents that are so problematic for many fleets.

“Motive’s impact has been unbelievable,” Eidinger says. “Motive AI Dashcams have completely transformed our safety program. Switching to AI cameras has brought an unbelievable change in safety.” 

Prudential’s own accountability has played a role as well. When drivers get caught on their phones, it’s an instant writeup with progressive discipline. Prudential has worked too hard to strengthen its safety culture to tolerate behaviors that put people at risk.

“You don’t know what drivers are doing out there until you actually see what they’re doing,” Mata says. “It’s an eye-opening experience for a lot of our managers and supervisors on the road. One thing we always tell them is, “You only see 5% of that individual working for you. But you don’t see the other 95%. That’s where the Motive cameras come in. They show us what drivers are doing outside of that 5%.”

Prudential uses Motive Safety Scores to see how drivers are performing at a glance. They can easily see which drivers are excelling and which need coaching. Prudential has customized their Motive Safety Scores, focusing exclusively on the high-risk behaviors that are most important to them. Says Eidinger: “The data we get from Motive is crucial to our operations.’” 

Focusing primarily on cell phone and seat belt use, Prudential tallies the average score of all active drivers, reporting it out to the executive team. With the visibility and control they get from Motive’s AI Dashcams, this approach has worked wonders for Prudential’s safety performance. “Since investing in AI Dashcams, our safety scores have definitely improved,” Eidinger says. 

Prudential holds its drivers to a safety score of 95 out of 100 but prefers to keep scores even higher, at 98. “We want to set the bar in our industry, we don’t want to meet the bar,” Eidinger says. “So that’s how we run everything. We set high expectations because if you set the bar in the middle, that’s the kind of performance you’ll get.”

“A lot of people don’t really shoot for the stars,” Mata adds. “They shoot for subpar, just trying to avoid bad accidents. Overall, we have to make sure we’re putting it out there that we expect perfection. Because if we fall a little bit off 100% and we’re at 95% or 90%, we’re still in pretty good shape. Obviously, we’re not going to be able to get to a point of zero accidents. But if we try really hard, we can get to just a handful of them.”

Eidinger and Mata love Motive’s customized features, which make the Motive platform even more user-friendly. When a near collision takes place, Prudential approaches it in two ways. First, they use video of the near miss to coach drivers on how to perform more safely, especially if distracted driving led to a close call. If, on the other hand, a driver’s skill avoided a collision, Prudential makes sure to reward the driver for their defensive driving. 

“We encourage our safety managers to recognize positive behavior, not just risky behavior,” Eidinger says. “We try to encourage our team to be just as diligent about recognizing positive behavior as they are about holding people accountable.”

To stay on top of things, Eidinger views videos of near collisions daily, along with videos of cell phone events and hard braking. Every Monday, she chooses three or four videos to share with the team that can be used as a coaching tool. The videos are posted to Prudential’s internal website, where they can be accessed for monthly coaching sessions or safety meetings.

“To recognize drivers for a job well done, our ultimate goal is to have a patch or pin made that says ‘Club 100,’ in honor of the highest Safety Score a driver can get,” Eidinger says. “They can wear it when they visit customers, so customers can see, I have a safe driver. As much as negativity breeds negativity, so does positivity, right? If other drivers are seeing that drivers are being rewarded for good behavior, we’re hoping it’ll catch on.”

But it’s not always their own drivers that Prudential has to worry about. When one of Prudential’s trucks was stolen and wrecked, “Motive was an absolute lifesaver,” Eidinger says. It all started when Mata and Eidinger received one of Motive’s collision alerts, notifying them of a collision over email. Eidinger watched on video as the thief flew down the street, rear-ended a minivan, crossed the median and two lanes of oncoming traffic, hit a cement pole, and lodged the vehicle into a pedestrian bridge.

“I’ll tell you, there was so much damage to the vehicle, we couldn’t get to the Motive gateway to unplug the camera,” Eidinger says. “I said, ‘You’re going to have to cut the cables. Hopefully Motive will be able to retrieve the footage.’ Motive recovered the footage of the kid stealing the truck, and it’s on the Motive cameras. So we’re going to turn that into the police department to help build the case. Working with Motive on this was seamless.”

Having the video from the AI Dashcam proved to be invaluable, especially since the perpetrator tried to pass it off like he was a Prudential employee. “Without the video, who knows what would have happened?”

Results

After implementing Motive’s AI Dashcams, hundreds of cell phone events at Prudential were revealed in a single month, a nod to the accuracy of Motive’s AI detection. Behind Motive’s AI precision and automated in-cab alerts, Prudential’s cell phone incidents have plummeted by 97%. 

Partnering with Motive has enabled Prudential to measure success and establish a strong safety foundation. They’ve come a long way since their early days with Motive, when they struggled with thousands of unidentified trips weekly. “With Motive’s help, we’ve reduced unidentified trips by 95%,” Eidinger says. 

Motive AI Dashcams have also eradicated seat belt violations at Prudential, dropping from 35 to zero in less than 6 months, underscoring the technology’s effectiveness in promoting safety. Prudential’s safety mindset, coupled with Motive’s advanced AI cameras, has elevated Prudential’s safety standards, aligning with the company’s goal of exceeding industry expectations.

Overall, the Motive-Prudential partnership has been crucial in refining Prudential’s reporting capabilities, allowing them to effectively extract and utilize data. Regular biweekly meetings with their Motive representative have been instrumental in maintaining a strong working relationship and promptly addressing any emerging issues. Through this partnership, Prudential has overcome obstacles in data management, ensuring their safety initiatives are constantly supported.

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.