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So much data, so many ways to use it. It’s easy to get lost in the discussion about business intelligence (BI). Throw away a lot of the buzz and BI is really about helping people in all different parts of your agency make better decisions.
There’s a bunch of technology behind the scenes to make that happen, but let’s forget that part for now and look at three simple, everyday ways your agency can use BI to do a better job right now.
It’ll be New Year’s Eve soon. It’s an especially dreadful winter and there’s been a bug going around that’s taken some of your drivers out of commission. To ensure optimal service, it’s essential that vehicle operators have a history of excellent attendance, good OTP on other holidays and no active complaints.
You can complete this task by using BI tools to create a dashboard that details key info on each driver from across OPS, including:
Attendance
Performance
Complaints/Commendations
By building this dashboard, you will quickly compile the required data to make intelligent, decisions about your ideal driver roster. As parameters change (e.g. an additional driver is required from extraboard) the dashboard will automatically update and trigger alerts to anyone required to track the change.
There’s been a spike in the number of accidents your agency is involved in. For the last couple quarters, the number of preventable accidents recorded by your bus drivers has grown almost a third. Why is it happening and what can be done, right now, to prevent it from happening again?
Your buses aren’t getting into accidents by themselves. Let’s look more closely at the folks that have been getting into accidents and see what we can learn. Build a dashboard with this focus:
Safety
Training
Now that you’ve zeroed-in on some of the underlying causes behind the rise in accidents, create a plan to start addressing the problem. Scale back on the overtime for those whose safety records are poorer when working extra hours. Does the number of accidents/incidents decline?
If yes, training was a success. If not, back to the data to find another answer.
Accidents happen. Thankfully, fatalities are rare. But incidents resulting in injury claims aren’t. In the case of such an incident, it’s essential to gather every relevant data point about the vehicle and operator involved, as well as all contextual data for the incident.
To get prepared, you’ll want a BI tool with a dashboard that pulls out all the relevant accident data available about the vehicle, route and driver (you’ll want all their recent operator safe training details, as well). You should also pull maintenance records on the vehicle via EAM to check for anything in the service record that could be a red flag. Adding in some historical data on accident rates for the route, schedule and similar weather conditions may also be valuable.
Incidents
Training
Vehicle
This core data can help you answer a lot of questions about the incident: Is the area an incident occurred known to have a lot of incidents, or traffic accidents? Has there been a history of complaints or incidents involving the route, vehicle or employee involved? How have similar incidents been successfully resolved in the past?
In each of these examples, it’s a combination of data in the system, some simple tools and the talent of your staff that extract and apply BI to your enterprise. Download our eBook, Predicting the Road Ahead, to learn more practical ways to use business intelligence to improve your agency.