SharePoint Use Case: Applied Driving Techniques

SharePoint Online lets a small business look a lot bigger than it really is, leveling the playing field in certain “size-does-matter” industries. One such business isApplied Driving Techniques, a health and safety/risk management business in the fleet management industry. Based in the UK, the business assesses, audits, and reports on the risks faced by organizations using fleet drivers.

Founder Andy Phillips says that SharePoint enables him to server larger customers, moving beyond the smaller businesses he once targeted when he used Microsoft Excel and Access to keep track of driver statistics, questionnaire data, and assessments and recommendations.

With SharePoint Online, he can do business with companies employing as many as 7,000 drivers, and keep his five employees and 28 contract trainers on track to handle customers’ needs in risk management, compliance, cost analysis, and training of fleet drivers, as well as track the assessment, training, and driving records of individuals within those customer organizations.

With the help of ThinkScape,  he was kitted out with SharePoint Online, enabling him to have a website and extranet portals for each customer to access. Typically customers will have about 25 users accessing the extranet portals. Companies can check on a driver’s training, performance, and assessments, and drivers can keep track of their progress. Companies can also get reports on where they can reduce cost, where they’re facing risk, and where they may or may not be complying with regulations.

The business is surprisingly data heavy. Beyond merely assessing and retraining drivers with unsafe driving habits, his organization is able to use business intelligence tools to look at the bigger picture, both statistically and from a process management perspective.

For example, businesses requiring a certain number of deliveries a day, rather than a certain number of hours worked delivering, will frequently see a higher number of crashes as drivers hurry to finish. Retraining such drivers in safe driving techniques doesn’t fix the greater problem of company policies creating the situation.

Being able to marshal the data from driver questionnaires, tests and training, as well as accident statistics, maps of routes, and other variables, allows Phillips and Applied Driving Techniques to present to organizations a picture of a truly mobile aspect of their business.