Electronic devices on trucks that record the amount of time a vehicle is driven by an individual have gotten a bad wrap for reducing fleet productivity, but an industry expert says results depend on how they are used.
Many large motor carriers have voluntarily installed onboard recorders on their trucks to make sure drivers are following daily and weekly driving limits. The U.S. Department of Transportation wants to make the devices mandatory for all interstate motor carriers, to replace paper-based log books that can be manipulated by the driver seeking more revenue miles.
John Larkin, a trucking sector analyst for financial services firm Stifel Nicolaus, estimates that electronic on-board recorders (EOBR) diminish productivity by 3 or 4 percent because drivers no longer are able to falsify their log books and carriers experience growing pains when learning how to best use the systems.
But trucking companies eventually gain back those implementation costs because they now know if a driver still has extra time on his or her daily on-duty clock and can be assigned to another load to increase asset utilization, Lana Batts, president of Transport Capital Partners LLC, said on a conference call with Stifel clients last week.
“The question is how long has the system been installed and used, and how integrated is it with the rest of their systems?” she said.
“If they’re only using it to monitor hours-of-service and they’re not fully integrating it into their dispatch systems, then yeah [it’s less effective]. So I think that the carriers that are fully integrated are figuring out ways to make it go. If you want to run legal this a way to do it and if you’re not, DOT is going to force you to install them anyway.”
Transport Capital Partners provides strategic, operational, and merger and acquisition advice to trucking and intermodal companies. – Eric Kulisch
Carriers should leverage EOBR data, Batts says
