Road Safety at INK LLC

Fleet Safety Management in Extreme Conditions

Road safety management at industrial sites with a vast geography requires unconventional approaches, especially when dealing with thousands of kilometers of temporary roads and a high dependence on contractors. With the constant growth of fleet mileage — up to 160 million kilometers per year — traditional control methods lose their effectiveness. In this webinar, Dmitry Feoktistov analyzes the practical experience of the Irkutsk Oil Company (INK) in reducing accident rates through in-depth work with the root causes of violations, rather than their consequences.

Lack of Rest as a Hidden Cause of Traffic Accidents

Incident analysis showed that every third traffic accident occurs due to insufficient driver rest. The problem is exacerbated by high staff turnover among contractors: most often, employees get into accidents during their first month of work, having not yet adapted to difficult road conditions — hundreds of ascents and descents on technological driveways.

The speaker notes that there are practically no affordable IT systems on the market capable of generating transparent reports on continuous driver rest time between shifts in one click. To solve this problem, a manual monitoring process was implemented. Contractor road safety specialists were required to provide weekly data on the rest time of each driver. This process was divided into three logical stages:

• Scaling data collection. At the first stage, the focus was exclusively on the completeness and accuracy of information without applying penalties. This made it possible to overcome contractor resistance and form a habit of regular reporting.
• Root cause analysis. After establishing data collection, specialists were required to explain every situation where rest was less than the established norm. The need to understand the causes forced road safety specialists to interact directly with mechanics and drivers, which automatically led to the normalization of work schedules.
• Targeted sanctions. Fines were applied only when the number of violations decreased to isolated cases, making the punishments fair and understandable for all participants in the process.

Reinvesting Fines into Contractor Qualifications

The second part of the presentation is devoted to the transformation of the penalty system. The standard claims process takes up to two months. In conditions of high staff turnover, by the time the fine arrives, the offending driver often no longer works for the company. In addition, it turned out that most drivers violate the rules unconsciously, relying on past negative experiences, while contractor road safety specialists only know how to issue fines but lack staff training skills.

To solve this problem, a mechanism embedded in the company's standards was used: contractors were allowed not to pay the fine directly to the customer, but to invest the equivalent amount specifically in road safety. In particular, into training their road safety specialists to become defensive driving trainers.

This approach radically changed the attitude of contractor managers towards fines. The financial burden turned into investments in their own personnel. Trained specialists began to competently analyze the physics of vehicle movement and the causes of accidents with drivers, which led to a sharp decrease in the number of repeated violations and the total number of traffic accidents.

What you will learn from this webinar:

• How to organize total control over the rest time of contractor drivers without implementing expensive telematics systems?
• Why does the standard system of fines for traffic violations lose its meaning with high staff turnover, and how to modernize it?
• How to overcome contractor resistance when introducing new forms of road safety reporting?
• How does the mechanism of targeted fine reinvestment help turn contractor inspectors into internal defensive driving trainers?