LeasePlan's OneScore - putting big data to work!

Over the last two weeks, my fellow bloggers, Kris Bush and Maggie Leark, have both talked about our driver scorecard called OneScore from the perspective of the driver and the fleet manager.

With ever-rising operating costs, fleet managers are often on the lookout for savings and more efficiencies. The typical challenge revolves around the diminishing returns of going through the same variables repeatedly to no avail, with marginal returns. You can only squeeze a budget so hard before it starts to hurt!

Fleets are hungry for ways to increase productivity, reducing operating expenses and lessening downtime for drivers, that's a fact. OneScore is here to help identify where these tough-to-find- opportunities may be hiding. OneScore is made up of three major buckets of data points – driver safety, efficiency and compliance, where each and every variable is scored against our aggregated internal benchmarks. This framework helps us have more intelligent discussions on what to focus the fleet on to unlock savings.

Our data-centric approach has proven that one of the most neglected fleet-cost villains is in fact the driver behavior itself, regardless of the size of the fleet.

If we are not watching driving behavior carefully, it can easily have a negative impact on a company’s bottom line. Better understanding of key data points can help bring clarity to poor total cost of ownership (TCO), and bring to life agonizing trends and enable fleet managers to take action to stop the "bleeding."

Many of us were awestruck by some of the figures shared by our telematics partner, Geotab, not too long ago. They said employers in the United States collectively pay $60 billion annually for motor vehicle crashes involving their employees in direct expenses – wow! The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) reported that each fatal car crash averages a payout of $500,000. This loss can exceed $1,000,000, depending on the severity and legal outcome.

Sadly, it doesn’t end there. Poor driver behavior can also adversely impact the number of vehicle incidents, driver productivity, vehicle downtime and replacement. Poor driving can also increase fuel and maintenance costs by large percentages, hitting a fleet’s efficiency performance levels. As the saying goes, more is NOT always better. However, in this context, data abundancy bodes well with what we are trying do with OneScore.

Though the world at large is still getting used to the advanced features in today’s cars to keep people safe, more Adaptive Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) data points will bring additional opportunities to connect vehicle data with TCO. With advanced tech like lane and steering assist that beeps [loudly] every time you take your eyes off the road, or when there’s a car right in your blind spot, drivers can get real-time car feedback for corrective action, but so can fleet operators! With embedded technologies becoming more common, carmakers are collecting massive amounts of data from every make and model out there.

It wasn’t too long ago, in the late 1990s, when the first vehicle tracking systems began to emerge with single client-server connectivity. But with the speed of technology advancements, telematics is a prevalent resource to gain insight from fleet drivers and the vehicles they are riding.

It's not hard to gain access to a flood of historical and real-time data these days, but the challenge is how to adequately unpack these vehicle and driver data points while marrying them with other sources of information to make the effort worthwhile.

It is with enthusiasm that we believe in the opportunity to promote fleet safety and greater fleet efficiencies through gaining a deeper appreciation of this daily “data-rich” alliance between drivers and their wheels. With the MyLeasePlan mobile app, we are gathering relevant connected and non-connected driver and vehicle data and weaving them into OneScore. This is unique in our industry. Some scorecards out there are still static reports – we think that's just not good enough for the modern fleet.

With OneScore, we empower fleet drivers to be the best fleet driver they can be. Because we aggregate OneScore data from any departmental structure or organizational model our clients need, OneScore is also fleet branch friendly. It goes without saying the tool can be seen at an enterprise level, too. Our algorithm-based method tracks, scores and provides feedback to drivers and fleet managers on their performance – and it's more than just safety data. OneScore cuts across performance indicators in three categories – safety, efficiency and compliance – and lets drivers and fleet operators know how they can be safer, more efficient, and in turn, reduce fleet costs.

The process of seamlessly joining all fleet activity into one easy-to-read score with the ability to drill down to see how drivers compare to their peers gives us an opportunity to better communicate with our drivers and determine focus areas.

At LeasePlan, we have taken the extra steps with our development teams to ensure our fleet analysis and data models are permeating into the business rather than nurturing siloed data sources. It is impossible to fully search the data points when you can't work horizontally between different data sources.

Recently, my buddy Greg Buckland, LeasePlan USA's CIO, and I spoke at an AFLA conference about “The Problem with Big Data” and how to turn information into a strategic asset. We discussed a rather healthy approach to “getting dirty” with big data. Talking from experience, we suggested the audience start small. Start by working out what you want to know first, then work out how you're going to get the information. This approach has helped us continue to evolve OneScore into a consultative tool. By elevating fleet performance into a dynamic scoring mechanism, it enables a simple conversation about what matters the most for our clients.

As for what's next – we will be taking OneScore from the responsive to the predictive. It will become not only a window into the present of your fleet, but somewhat of a crystal ball giving you insight into where your fleet's performance is headed, and where to make improvements to change that trajectory!

If you'd like to learn more about our telematics, safety and OneScore solutions just contact us!

As executive vice president of transformation at LeasePlan USA, Felipe Smolka is leading the strategy to drive modernization and innovation across the U.S. subsidiary and launch the company further into its journey to deliver what's next for fleet, mobility and connected vehicles. Smolka's career has consistently revolved around digital transformation, developing cutting-edge technologies and leveraging the power of big data to create and deliver value. With a strong history of successes, Smolka is a proven leader poised to transform the fleet industry. Smolka has an MBA from Emory Goizueta Business School.