Briggs Equipment a Semifinalist for Safety Award

The National Safety Council announced Briggs Equipment as a semifinalist for the organization’s Green Cross for Safety® Award in its Excellence category. The award recognizes a variety of outstanding projects and organizations working to eliminate preventable deaths at work, in homes and communities, or on the road.

Briggs Equipment services a variety of equipment at customer’s locations via our technicians and service vehicles. We also deliver new, used and rental equipment via tractor-trailers and rollbacks. Between these activities, over 75% of our team members are exposed to a variety of hazards on the road including potential automobile accidents that could cause serious injuries or fatalities.

Our Environmental, Health & Safety team created the NSC-nominated program, the Safe Driving Initiative, in January of 2018, to better assess and address driving hazards. It involved analyzing tracked driving data of 740 company vehicles to reduce and eliminate accidents involving Briggs Equipment team members across our 28 locations in 8 states.

The team used a telematics tracking system, which reports on speeding, acceleration, deceleration, and turning, to establish baselines of behavior.

Steps taken to improve driver safety included:

• One-on-one driver coaching with customized feedback to improve safety
• Implementing hands-free GPS directions by requiring Bluetooth connections to phones in vehicles and retrofitting fleet vehicles that didn’t have Bluetooth
• All team members attending a Distracted Diving online coarse and passing with a score of 80% or higher (and subsequent new team members passing this course)
• Monthly safety training and safety huddles

Since the program’s implementation:

• Driving scores improved from 90% to 95%, while our accident rate per million miles driven dropped from 4.77 to 3.51
• Automobile accidents have been reduced by 60%, which equates to 28 fewer accidents due to all of the actions taken to improve safe driving
• 50% reduction in cost of auto accidents

Briggs Equipment will continue its focus on safe driving with an ultimate goal of zero at-fault auto accidents, which will require additional defensive driving training as well as safety training specific to the vehicle driven.

For information about how Briggs Equipment can help keep you and your team safe, check out our full line of warehouse safety products and safety training.

You can also follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter with our #BESafe campaign. Have a safety moment of your own you’d like to share? Tag us on social!