by Joy Bailer at Telematics 411 Consulting LLC
Geotab’s Driver Safety Scorecard Report is an invaluable tool for fleet managers wanting to get an at-a-glance picture of their fleet’s current safety habits. At a high level, here is what it does:
*Example: a driver with 10 violations in 50 miles will be given a much lower safety score than a driver with 10 violations in 500 miles.
In this article we cover the basics of setting up a Driver Safety Scorecard in your MyGeotab database, customizing the report, and understanding how to read the data provided once you’ve got everything set up and running.
To set up a Driver Safety Scorecard Report, navigate to the Dashboard in MyGeotab and scroll to the bottom where you will see the following options:
Click the box in the upper left of the Safety section and then click the Get started button at the bottom of the screen.
You will see a number of other reports automatically selected on the pop-up screen. For the sake of simplicity and the purpose of this tutorial, we recommend that you uncheck all the other boxes so that only the Driver Safety Scorecard option is selected. Then click Next step in the lower right.
The next step lets you select which users will be able to see the new Driver Safety Scorecard Report you are setting up. If you are the only user who should see this, leave the settings as they are and click Next step without making any modifications to the settings.*
*While it is possible to use the Groups feature to make this visible to multiple users at once, we will cover the use case of adding groups of users and/or other individual users in the section on Customizing a Driver Safety Scorecard Report below.
The final page in the setup here will inform you that the report requires a number of rules to be created in order for it to run. You can review the list of rules that will be enabled on this page, and then click Create reports to have the Driver Safety Scorecard Report enabled in your database.
For your reference, here is the list of rules that will be created and used for safety metrics within the newly-created report:
Once you click Create reports you will see a loading screen.
After the report has loaded you can find it displayed on the Dashboard at the bottom of your reports list.
NOTE: Although it starts out at the bottom of your reports list, this report can be clicked along the top where the title is and dragged into position on your Dashboard so that you can have it displayed in the area most relevant to you.
As a general rule, your Driver Safety Scorecard Report will likely need to be modified in order to fit your fleet’s specific needs. There are a number of areas in which modifications can be made, and we will cover each of these below.
Adjust Rule Parameters
The first area you can adjust to make the Driver Safety Scorecard Report fit your fleet’s needs is the Rules section. Navigate to Groups & Rules > Rules within your MyGeotab database. Here you will find the standard rules that were set up when you created the Scorecard Report for your Dashboard. Five of the six rules that the report uses are at the very top of this page under the Safety section:
Use the slider bars to adjust the sensitivity for the different harsh-movement rules (e.g. Harsh Braking) and use the slider or input an exact value under Speeding to make these metrics align with your company’s safety policy. After making the adjustments to each of these rules you will see a Save button to the right of the slider bars, which you’ll need to use t apply any changes.
The other rule used in the Driver Safety Scorecard Report is a custom rule called Excessive Speeding. This is located at the very bottom of the Rules page and will be listed along with any other custom rules in your database:
The default value for this rule is any speeding over 75 MPH. If you would like to change this rule, click the Excessive Speeding title, navigate to the Conditions tab, and click the little icon that looks like a piece of paper, which will be located under the other buttons or to the far left depending on the size of your screen:
This will open the Advanced Conditions Editor that can be used to make a change to the actual speed. Delete the number (in this example 74.9995029030462) and enter the vehicle speed that your Excessive Speeding rule should have. Click the Save button to apply your changes.
Once you have made the edits to any rules and saved them so that they reflect the safety policies of your company your new parameters will be applied to the Driver Safety Scorecard Report going forward.
Customize the Driver Safety Scorecard Report Template
Generically, there are three main steps to customizing any report template in MyGeotab:
*Alternatively, you can upload the modified template as a brand-new report if you prefer to keep the original template as its own separate report.
To download the report template for the Driver Safety Scorecard Report navigate to Reports > Report Setup > Dashboard. Under the Built-in Reports section find the Risk Management category and click the title of the Driver Safety Scorecard.
Click Export at the top of the following page to download a template of the report.
Open the report in Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. Click Enable Editing at the top of the report in order to make any changes.
At this point, you can make many different changes to the report template so that when you reupload the report in MyGeotab it will have your changes reflected in all successive reports generated from your new template. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will cover what is perhaps the most common edit to a Driver Safety Scorecard Report: changing the weights of the different safety metrics found on the Report sheet of the Excel document.
While looking at your report in Excel, navigate to the Report sheet of the workbook. Here you will see a box with your six different rules along with the weights the report has assigned to each.*
*NOTE: We will cover the way the report processes these weights in the next section on interpreting data.
You can edit this box with any weights you’d like as long as all six total 100%. For example, your company’s policy may be extra concerned with Speeding and Excessive Speeding incidents and prefer to have those two paint the bulk of the picture when it comes to overall driver-safety scoring. In this case, adjust the weights until they are more aligned with your company’s policies.
Here is a sample adjusted set of weights:
Now that we’ve made an adjustment to the report template, we need to save our changes and upload the report back into MyGeotab.
The first thing to keep in mind when saving a MyGeotab report is that the report will display on the Dashboard whichever sheet was open when the document was saved. Since this report will display on the Dashboard and we’d prefer to keep the regular Risk Breakdown doughnut graph as the default view, we’ll first navigate to the Risk Breakdown sheet within the document and then Save our changes.
As a quick side note, the graph on this page has adjusted slightly due to our changes to the rule weights (original is on the left and new is on the right):
Now the report is ready to be uploaded back into MyGeotab.
Since our original version of this report was a Built-in Report it cannot have its template modified. Instead, you will need to upload your modified template as a brand-new Custom report. Here’s how:
You can now navigate to the Dashboard in MyGeotab to see your newly-created report.
The first time you look at a Driver Safety Scorecard Report it may appear a bit daunting, so in this section we’ll unpack what each section of the report is for.
Data Summary Information
The first section of the Report shows a brief overview of the data. This includes the Date Range as well as the total Fleet Distance traveled by all vehicles as well as the total number of safety exceptions recorded during the specified time period. The Average Fleet Score box is a miniature version of the Risk Breakdown graph and provides an at-a-glance visualization of roughly which percentage of your drivers are in which of the various risk categories.
Rule Weights and Risk Classification
The next section of the report includes the Rule Weights that we adjusted earlier in this post as well as the Risk Range classifications. The Classification box lets you define what levels of risk your company considers as Low Risk on up through High Risk. Each driver’s Total Score (discussed in the next section) is placed in one of these risk categories based on where it falls within the defined ranges. The Average Fleet Score graph discussed in the section above uses the Classification labels for each driver to display which percentage of drivers are in which risk category.
Main Report Details
The main details in the Driver Safety Scorecard are listed in the section pictured below. This provides information about the Driver or Vehicle, the Distance driven by each, their cumulative Total Score information, along with the Score Classification, indicating what level of risk each Driver or Vehicle poses.
Following the Score Classification above, a reader can see the breakdown of the score based on each broken rule.
Incidents and Calculations
The final sections in the Driver Safety Scorecard Report provide additional details for users interested in understanding exact data from which the drivers’ scores were calculated.
Incidents provides an exact count of each rule that was broken.
The Calculations section takes into account which percentage of a driver’s trip included an exception. Specifically, this is dealing with Speeding and Seat belt cases and comparing the distance traveled while Speeding or failing to wear a Seat belt with the total distance traveled by the driver.
Phew! That was a lot. But hopefully it’s given you a better understanding of how the Driver Safety Scorecard Report works.
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