An optimized driving style leads to less maintenance and energy savings of up to 25%.
The growing number of companies looking into driver coaching, is mainly motivated by its comprehensive safety benefits for sites, lone workers, and many other risk mitigation applications. But there is a yet little known perk of driver coaching and how this technology may save your company fuel cost and lower your carbon footprint.
Granted, it will not represent the most sizeable corporate step en route to a better environment. But since industries are evolving towards a multifaceted sustainability-approach, driver coaching most definitely has a right to be embraced as one of those facets.
And for those companies that deploy a substantial volume of forklifts, or other carbon fueled on-site vehicles, the impact may considerably surpass the mere cosmetic. So keep on reading to find out how you can use proximity monitoring to save fuel.
A most welcome side-effect
Aided by IoT technology, driver coaching warns equipment operators actively, in real-time, when they are speeding, braking, accelerating or turning too fast.
Simultaneously, the data harvested by driver coaching also provides companies with a powerful tool to register and analyze data. This allows for identifying dangerous behavior and accordingly can help ensure that safety standards and rules are enforced.
When applied to on-site vehicles such as forklifts, this will result indirectly in:
- improved vehicle utilization – benefit: asset savings
- improved vehicle handling – benefit: maintenance savings
- improved vehicle efficiency – benefit: fuel savings.
In view of this article this last indirect result bears some closer examination.
Impact on cost and environment
Expected Monetary Value Evaluation is a tool embraced by a rising number of companies to gain an insight in the financial implications of risk mitigation. In short it puts a monetary value on a mitigation solution.
When taking driver coaching as a preventive safety measure, an EMV-evaluation will focus primarily on the direct and indirect costs relating to incidents.
However, the evaluation will also take into account any extra benefits/side-effects of the mitigation. In this use case for example: improved vehicle efficiency. It will then proceed to put a monetary value on it, and by doing so confirm/authenticate it as significant.
Having none of the vehicles in your on-site fleet exceeding the appropriate and fuel-efficient speed is safer AND saves on fuel. An optimized driving style leads to less maintenance and energy savings of up to 25%. Seems pretty straightforward? That’s because it is. Driver coaching to save fuel? Scale-wise it may be a relatively small, but nevertheless a factual addition to the overall ‘return on safety’ that top tier collision avoidance solutions provide.
Just as straightforward as a reduced fuel usage resulting in a lower carbon footprint. This being a more specific return on safety. And admittedly, one that is harder to assign a monetary value, but these days no less relevant. And as stated above, an always welcome extra facet in every company’s overall sustainability-approach.
