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3 Ways BI Helps Your Agency Operate More Smoothly

Jul 27, 2016
Reading Time:
Bus
Paratransit
Rail
Data & Analytics

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.
 

1. Schedule the optimal crew for a tricky route

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

  • # of absences by absence type 
  • # of employees that have written reprimands against them

Performance

  • Overall on time performance percentage
  • Performance by route or schedule type
  • Routes delayed by calendar date and time of day

Complaints/Commendations

  • # of active complaints by operator
  • # of complaints by route

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.
 

2. Figure out why accidents are up and fix it

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

  • What are agency policies on how many hours a driver can work in a week? Are these set in the system and tracking all drivers correctly?
  • For each incident in the corresponding period, have any of the drivers been working overtime hours when the incident occurred? That’s important to know because a significant increase in individual overtime may correlate with a rise in accidents.

Training

  • Do all the drivers involved have the training they need both in terms of basic driver safety, but also to work with on-board equipment and systems? A lack of familiarity, for example, with ITS hardware may be causing drivers to lose concentration on the road, or adding undue stress that contributes to the accidents that are happening.

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.
 

3. Responding to incidents that could result in claims

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

  • Total # of incidents
  • # of preventable and non-preventable incidents
  • List of incidents by type

Training

  • Individual operator training and incident records
  • # staff awaiting training after similar incidents

Vehicle

  • Vehicle service history

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.


 
Robert Chang is the Product Director - BI, Reporting & Analysis at Trapeze Group. He has 15 years in the BI development, delivery and consulting space. He’s traveled the globe designing and implementing global BI solutions for the public sector (Citizenship and Immigration Canada / Canadian Border Services) involving 5,000 users in 100 countries; as well as for pharmaceuticals (GlaxoSmithKline - GSK), involving 20,000+ BI users across 50 countries in 20 languages. He’s a trusted advisor in the public sector, life sciences and high tech industries.
 
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