Share the delivery, not the driver's day

Most heavy vehicles in a large Australian fleet now report their position every few seconds. They also record speed, braking, engine faults, door openings, trailer temperatures and, increasingly, footage from cameras pointed at the road and at the driver. The data is valuable, and customers know it. In the last three years nearly every major contract tender we have answered has asked for some form of live access to our telematics. Some have asked for all of it.

My position is that carriers should share delivery events generously and raw telematics sparingly. A shipper is entitled to know where its freight is, when it will arrive and whether it was kept at the right temperature. It is not, in my view, entitled to a continuous record of a named driver's working day, and handing that over can weaken the safety obligations that carriers are meant to carry. I hold the position after defending it in a contract renewal worth A$190 million a year.

What customers ask for and what they use

When a customer asks for a live feed, I ask what decision it will support. The answers are nearly always about time: when to open a dock, when to call in a receiving crew, when to warn a store that its delivery is late. Raw positions answer those questions poorly. A dot moving on a map must be interpreted, and every customer then builds its own estimate from our data, often worse than the one we already compute with knowledge of the driver's roster, the queue at the next stop and the traffic on the route.

What customers actually use is events. Departed. Estimated arrival, revised. At the gate. At the dock. Unloaded. Temperature out of range, and for how long. When our largest grocery customer asked for thirty-second positions, speed, harsh-braking alerts and driver identity for about 310 vehicles, we offered an event feed instead, with vehicle position only within 40 kilometres of its sites. In a six-week pilot at two distribution centres, average dock waiting fell from 74 to 41 minutes. The improvement came from estimates that updated themselves, not from anyone watching trucks.

There are fair arguments on the other side. Customers have been let down by carriers' estimates before. Some want to verify claims of traffic delay or investigate a temperature failure. A position trace near their sites, or a trace released for a specific investigation, meets those needs without a permanent feed of everything.

It is worth asking, too, what happens to a raw feed after the contract that justified it ends. Few of the tender documents we receive say how long a customer would keep our drivers' traces, who inside the customer could read them, or whether they would pass to its own technology suppliers. A carrier that cannot answer those questions has not really decided to share data. It has simply stopped controlling it.

Safety data has a different owner

The harder argument concerns speed, braking and fatigue. Under the Heavy Vehicle National Law, which applies in every state and territory except Western Australia and the Northern Territory, each party in the chain of responsibility has a duty to ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, the safety of its transport activities. That includes consignors and consignees. The law also restricts requests and contract terms that would encourage a driver to exceed a speed limit or work beyond fatigue limits.

A customer receiving every driver's speed and braking record in real time might seem to strengthen that system. In practice it confuses it. Who acts on a harsh-braking alert, the customer or the carrier? If a customer sees a pattern of speeding and says nothing, what has it accepted? If it contacts the driver directly, it has stepped into a relationship that belongs to the operator. Our safety coaches review events triggered by in-cab cameras and telematics under a policy that drivers know and that limits who sees what. A parallel stream into a customer's control room sits outside that policy.

What a customer legitimately needs is assurance that the carrier manages speed and fatigue properly, and audit provides that better than surveillance. In our renewed contract the customer gained an annual right to examine our fatigue and speed management: our policies, our exception reports, a sample of investigations and the actions that followed. It sees how the system works rather than every data point the system produces.

There is also the matter of the people being recorded. Our employed drivers receive written notice of vehicle tracking, which New South Wales law requires before tracking begins, and those notices describe who sees the data. About a quarter of the vehicles serving that customer belong to owner-drivers who contract with us. Neither group had agreed to have its working day streamed to a company that does not employ them, and I did not think we should agree on their behalf.

A data schedule in every contract

The practical result is a short schedule now attached to 52 of our customer contracts. It lists the events we share and how quickly, the circumstances in which position data is released and to whom, the safety assurance the customer may audit, how long each kind of data is kept, and the data that never leaves Morrowgate, which includes driver identity, camera footage and individual speed records. Customers can negotiate the events and the timing. They cannot negotiate that final list.

The schedule has costs. We conceded a rate reduction of 1.1 per cent in the grocery renewal, about A$2.1 million a year, partly to settle the argument. We spent A$1.4 million building the event feed. Our sales team now explains in tenders why we will not offer what some competitors do, and we have lost at least one smaller contract on that point.

I accept those costs because the alternative scales badly. Every customer that receives a raw feed builds its own interpretation of our drivers' behaviour, retains it under its own policies and may pass it further. Multiply that by fifty customers and nobody can say where a driver's working day is stored or who has reviewed it. A carrier that shares events and keeps the traces can answer that question at any moment, to a customer, a driver or a regulator. I think that answer is worth more than the business we have lost by giving it.