Microlise are excited to announce a range of innovative additions to their Fleet Performance Solution focusing on enhancing safety, reducing risk, accidents and insurance costs.

For the majority of the last decade, Microlise have saved their customers millions of pounds by providing them with accurate telematics driving style information which has allowed fuel economy improvements to be made by rewarding good driving and identifying uneconomical and unsafe driving practices.

Microlise’s innovative approach to representing this data in their “A-G” league tables have been central to this and have won many plaudits across the industry.

Microlise have now built upon this core fuel economy platform to focus more specifically on analysing and reporting upon safe driving practices – this is wholly driven by the overarching requirement of any transport operation to ensure the highest levels of safety for their drivers, other road users and the general public at large.

Microlise’s Fleet Performance Safety Module consists of a number of innovative “plug-ins” which can be implemented as a whole or individually.

Integrated Forward Facing Camera

Microlise now integrates with SmartWitness forward facing cameras so that the Microlise system will now alert when an in-cab camera has been triggered. This reduces the management overhead, allows specific incidents to be targeted and makes it easier to find specific incidents relating to complaints from members of the public for example.

Customer’s using the Forward Facing Camera have seen reductions in incident levels of over 70% and claim costs reduced by similar amounts

Incident Data Recorder – A unique software enhancement from Microlise

The MTU3 monitors – on an on-going basis and at a sample rate of four times a second – the status of the vehicle and the actions of the driver.

In the event of an incident, the Microlise system records 60 seconds of data which is automatically transmitted as a log to the Microlise host system. Users are able to us a Microlise web console to understand in great detail what the vehicle and driver were doing leading up to and after the incident.

Information captured includes, vehicle location, speed, direction, accelerator position, braking (service and exhaust), ABS status, gears, cruise control state, clutch operation and PTO.

Contextual Speeding

Every time a tracked vehicle reports into the Microlise Fleet Performance system, the system looks up the posted road speed for the leg of road the vehicle is on and compares it to the speed reported from the vehicle. Any infringements are then reported upon by driver / vehicle.

Customers already using Microlise’s contextual speeding module have achieved reductions of over 90% in speeding incidents.

Harsh Braking & Cornering

The Microlise telematics unit has always reported upon harsh braking, now the MTU3 reports on harsh cornering. It does this without the need for an accelerometer by using an innovative technique of sampling vehicle location at a very high rate (many times a second) and deriving lateral g-force based rate of change of heading. The MTU3 now alerts when “lateral” g-forces are exceeded under cornering for given vehicle profiles.

This, coupled with the above speeding profile, allows users to understand how aggressively the vehicle is being driven.

Roll over Alerting

Trailers with Knorr-Bremse EBS can pass a signal to the Microlise Telematics unit do indicate when roll-over intervention has been triggered (to help stop a trailer tipping). Again this helps to form a picture of how safely / aggressively a vehicle is being driven.

Extended A-G Reporting

All events captured by these safety plug-ins are visible in the map client as well as our standard activity and debrief reports. Crucially, Microlise’s innovative A-G reports have been enhanced to include these safety elements as well. In this way driver leagues, by depot or fleet now give a indication of both economical but also a wider measure of safe driving.

With these enhanced reports, Microlise continue to lead the way in the accurate and innovative reporting of driving style information. No other report can provide such a complete picture of:

Matt Hague, Product Strategy Director at Microlise comments:

“Microlise have led the way in the provision of Telematics solutions for almost a decade, we have a very large customer base of commercial vehicles, made up of both direct customers and automotive partners, like MAN Trucks UK. From a fuel economy perspective, our technology has helped our customers save tens of millions of pounds every year by targeting bad driving practices.

“Our customer’s fed back to us just how paramount the safety of their drivers and the wider public is to them and we quickly identified how we could take our core solution and build onto it some very clever safety centric enhancements. The Safety Module we have introduced, we believe, as a combined package of safe driving measures, is without peer in the industry and offers great value as it builds on the current proven Microlise solution”.

Using the same core Telematic’s platform, Microlise are now able to provide users with a enhanced level of driving style information more targeted to measuring safe driving directly which, when used to change driver behaviour, has a marked impact upon accident rates, risks and costs.