Navigating the FMCSA’s Newly-Enhanced Safety Measurement System (SMS)

by Joe Doerr

There are approximately 5 million truck and bus drivers sharing the road with more than 250 million motorists. With stakes so high, it’s essential that everyone including concrete pumping companies get road smart about CSA. CSA is the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration’s (FMCSA) safety compliance and enforcement program, which promotes safety compliance to help keep our nation’s roadways safer for everyone.

The updated FMCSA website, with a fresh new look and smoother feel, is enhanced in a way that aspires to let organizations quickly and efficiently improve safety behaviors. FMCSA realized that being able to see relevant information quickly, and in a way that illustrates that information as simply as possible, is the best way forward.

The SMS assesses motor carrier safety compliance and identifies carriers for interventions using all roadside violation, inspection and crash data available. According to FMCSA, this means that each year data collected from at least 3.5 million roadside inspections and 100,000 crash reports feed into SMS to identify noncompliant and at-risk carriers. It’s important to remember that concrete pumps are classified as commercial motor vehicles (CMV), and, as such, are subject to the same standards as a commercial trucking company.

The SMS assesses carrier safety based on 24 months of inspection and crash data, and considers items such as: the number of safety violations; the severity of those violations or crashes; and when those safety violations occurred, with recent events weighted more heavily.

When motor carriers and concrete pumping companies log into SMS, they can quickly view their performance status in regards to a specific behavioral analysis and safety improvement category (BASIC). This also includes the ability to view your crash indicator and hazardous materials compliance scores, both of which are not available to the public. Unsafe driving, hours of service and the other remaining BASICs are available for public view. Organizations can also view detailed information on roadside inspections and crashes. Of course, private details such as driver names and other carrier-specific information are not made public.

Logging in to SMS to see where you stand is something you’ll want to do on a regular basis. FMCSA updates the SMS once a month with roadside inspection and crash data from the previous 24 months. Concrete pumping companies are subject to DOT interventions based on their CSA scores in the same way that trucking companies are. However, there are many concrete pumping businesses that have yet to view the data that’s available. The new SMS website should make that process a little easier.

DIVING DEEPER INTO THE BASICS

You can get to the site by navigating over to the CSA section of the FMCSA website. Public access is found athttps://csa.fmcsa.dot.gov and carrier access is found at https://ai.fmcsa.dot.gov/Login/Default.aspx?ReturnURL=/SMS/.

Once you’re there, you’ll see a search box where you can enter your U.S. DOT number. Once you’ve entered your DOT number into the search bar on the site, you’ll get to the main overview page. Here’s how you can dive deeper into your data:

1). Located at the top center of your SMS profile, there’s now a table showing Safety Ratings—satisfactory, conditional, unsatisfactory or none—based on a ratable compliance review and not based on the BASICs. There’s also a new table showing out-of-service rates.

2). At the top right of your SMS profile is licensing and insurance information, which now includes both types of insurance and minimum amounts required.

3). In the center of the page, hover over and select a BASIC icon and it will appear darker than the rest. The box on the left called “On-Road Performance” summarizes motor carrier performance in this particular BASIC, including on-road performance status, performance measure and percentile, percentile performance as it relates to the intervention threshold, safety event group information and investigation results. You can also select “More Info” for additional details.

4). Below that, select “Who Is in the Safety Event Group?” to see which other carriers are in the safety event group with you. It will prompt an Excel spreadsheet to download on your computer. You can also view the “Carrier Measure Over Time” graph to view a carrier’s measure based on 24 months of on-road performance data. Zero indicates best performance, and you can select “Expand” for additional information and to customize the data displayed on the graph.

5.) At this point, once you’ve studied your “Carrier Measure Over Time” graph, you can select “Measure vs. Percentile” for a new graph that shows how a carrier’s measure correlates with its percentile rank over a selected period of time. Violations or crashes are weighted by time and severity to produce a measure in each BASIC. The measure is then used to assign that carrier to a percentile rank containing carriers’ information in similar safety event groups. You can select “Expand” for more information and to customize the data displayed on this graph.

6). The best practice here would be to review the expanded graph and violations to identify trends within your company. These trends will be unique to your operations and will be items you can immediately address in your next safety meeting or operating manual update. Also keep in mind that NBIS risk personnel provide customized resources (training materials, impact calculators and other tools) to insureds based on the violation information.

7). It’s important to remember that the measure only considers individual performance based on 24 months of data, with a measure of zero indicating the best performance possible. You can select from the drop-down to view this actual performance data, along with how this data would appear applying the most recent SMS methodology. Also keep in mind that measures are produced for individual carriers based on violations or crashes weighted by time and severity. Those measures are then used to determine BASIC percentiles, which compare carriers with similar safety events.

GOING FORWARD

“What’s measured and monitored can be improved.” Regardless of whether you’re a concrete pumping company or a trucking company, it’s important to know where you stand, both in your peer group and among the network of motor carriers nationwide. You may log on to the new SMS website and find that you’re performing well and there’s nothing to be worried about, but you may also find out that there’s information on your company that you weren’t even aware of. Regardless, SMS data provides opportunities for improvement, and it doesn’t get any simpler than that.

To learn more about how you’re performing, contact the NBIS Transportation Risk Management at (855) STS-NBIS, or (855) 787-6247. Our team of experts will review these online resources with you and assist with developing an improvement plan to address each area of opportunity, thus helping you operate a safer and more profitable business.