Fleet Safety Services consultant Jeff Davis got a pretty resounding series of groans from his audience when he introduced a session last week at the National Association of Small Trucking Companies’ annual meeting in Nashville, Tenn. His subject: the implementation, utilization and subsequent enforcement issues surrounding electronic logging devices.
Davis puts the impending electronic log mandate among “the biggest changes we’ve had in safety and compliance and in the industry generally in the last 50 years.” Ripple effects, necessarily, will be felt.
But not to be discouraged, however, “we’ll get through this e-log implementation,” he said, and “there’s a pot of gold out there for all us who can make it through.”
For the smallest of fleets, the majority of whom have yet to implement any e-logging system whatsoever, according to previously published Overdrive research, challenges to implementation include the necessity of back-office staff to better assist on-highway drivers with freight scheduling to meet ever tighter delivery windows around rigidly defined hours-of-service limits. Renegotiation of freight contracts with shippers to include mandatory detention pay for drivers, too, is often a tactic that comes as a natural outgrowth of e-log implementation, Davis says, putting leverage on a customer to improve loading/unloading efficiency.
As it is today, too often shippers are turning truck drivers into “truck waiters,” Davis says. Reducing detention time “is one of the great keys to electronic logs.”
Many of Davis’s clients initial see a 12-15 percent reduced rate of productivity with implementation, with a boost in costs.
“So I should get ready to sell my truck,” said an owner-operator in the audience at the event who counted himself among the 70 percent of independents who, according to past Overdrive research, said that they’d leave the industry before they’d run with an e-log.
