You Received A CSA 2010 FMCSA Warning Letter—Now What?

Getting a warning letter from the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) on your CSA 2010 scores can be intimidating to even the biggest carrier, but with the proper perspective and action, it can actually be the catalyst to refocus your safety efforts.

An FMCSA warning letter is simply that, a warning that your CSA BASIC scores are high and out of compliance with CSA 2010 regulations.  The letter also provides information on the violation areas that need work.  By analyzing the violation areas and implementing new training and safety standards for these areas, the carrier can avoid more drastic FMCSA action.  Designed to centralize violation and intervention information and streamline intervention workflow, CSAdvantage helps fleet and driver managers to do just that.

Analyze the data

The first step in reducing violations and improving your fleet’s safety standards is to determine the source of any violations, and to tailor your response accordingly. As many have found, it’s difficult to address driver violations without sufficient information, and CSAdvantage helps by tracking a fleet’s violations and providing report functionality to determine trends, routine violators, and provide training options.  The combination is a powerful partner in helping carriers assess and improve their CSA 2010 scores.  In addition, you can also track non-CSA violations to address other areas of interest for your particular organization.

CSAdvantage provides a deep dive analysis of violations, driver profiles shows more detailed information about a driver, including the driver’s name, driver identification number, most recent hours of service score, a full intervention and violation history, notes logged by other fleet or driver managers, and violations logged from inspections or from hours of service modules. For evaluation, documentation, or audit purposes, all violations and driver records can be exported in PDF format for use in performance evaluations or documentation for a DOT audit.

Take action to improve safety

After having analyzed driver violation data, it’s time to take action to address the violations that have occurred and reduce the number of violations that occur. This is where interventions come in. In addition to displaying driver information, the driver profile module of CSAdvantage provides CSA 2010 training by setting up interventions.  The carrier can choose if a driver should take an eLearning training module (supplied by J. J. Keller), undergo counseling, or attend an escalated safety management meeting. The intensity of the intervention is up to driver and fleet managers, depending on the severity and number of a driver’s violations.

Finally, the audit rules system of CSAdvantage allows you to lower the threshold to increase the number of discussions and interventions, while violation types triggers automatic interventions for specific violations (such as failure to wear a seatbelt) in order to focus attention on violations specific to your fleet.

Integrating violation data from several different sources, the CSAdvantage program acts as an overall safety and compliance engine, allowing you to work with your drivers to reduce violations, increase fleet safety and improve future CSA scores. With the power of CSAdvantage behind your fleet, you’ll have no problem analyzing and taking the action necessary to make your fleet safer than ever before.  For more information on CSAdvantage and a demo, contact us 800-298-7202.