Insights That Inspired Safer Driving: George Weston Foods

Health and safety is an integral part of sustainability

Organisations that are serious about embracing health and safety innovations as a leading part of their company’s sustainability strategy, knows that doing so is not only good for their employees and society at large, but also ends up being good for their business. This is because the number of injuries, illnesses and fatalities decrease, workplace wellness improves and, combined, this results in reduced financial losses. WorkSafe has calculated that work-related ill-health and injuries carries a social cost of at least $2 billion each year in New Zealand.

How can a business change processes to keep employees safe from work-related risks?

Consistent and reliable metrics are a critical part of this transformation. In sustainability, it’s common knowledge that what’s important gets measured and what’s measured gets done. Without the integration of consistent and reliable safety and health metrics, any discussion of these issues is just lip service.

We are proud to say that Teletrac Navman’s vehicle tracking software helped inspire safer driving at George Weston Foods. Efforts such as those by George Weston Foods are paving the way for other FMCG fleets to report and improve on their health and safety journey more effectively.

When George Weston Foods started looking for ways to encourage safer driving and provide a safer workplace for their employees, they turned to technology. Our vehicle tracking system was installed to provide their team with a safety-based monitoring system to enable a cultural shift in the mindsets around driving and safety.

Delivering your daily bread

George Weston Foods is one of New Zealand’s largest manufacturers of bakery products, producing over 1.2 million loaves of bread, buns, rolls, muffins, and crumpets each week under the Tip Top, Bürgen, Ploughman’s, Big Ben, Golden and Bazaar brands.

While the company provides well maintained vehicles with high safety ratings, defensive driver training, and other initiatives to help keep its team and others on the road safer, they believed there was a significant opportunity to raise personal awareness of driving behaviours.

George Weston Foods (GWF) didn’t want Teletrac Navman’s system to just be a top-down leadership tool. They wanted their employees to take an interest in their own driving. “We don’t want the Teletrac Navman system to just be a leadership tool. We want people to take an interest in their own driving,” said Geoff Hutt, General Manager of GWF.

The company has set it up so that every driver can log in to view their own GPS-based driving data in the fleet tracking software. They can review their personal driving behaviours through second-by-second reporting based on very high definition tracking data technology. The technology can pick up on when a driver is braking, accelerating or cornering too harshly.

George Weston Foods has seen a positive shift with company drivers becoming curious and wanting to see how they can improve their driver scorecard results. The company back up their commitment to safer driving through a system where very month the top 10 safest drivers are published and celebrated. Geoff is passionate about empowering individuals to change their behaviour, saying; “It’s not about where you go. It’s how you go that’s important to us.”

Since implementing our fleet tracking system, GWF has:

• Used fleet management software as a tool for cultural change and individual-led driving improvements.
• Reduced its overspeed incidents over three months by 48 percent from once every 174km to once every 337km.
• Recognised safe drivers based on driver scorecards that show speed, acceleration, cornering, and braking.

“The results were incredibly insightful – some people were really surprised how complacent their attention to driving had become.”

If your company is interested in using technology to innovate, report and improve your health and safety journey – then get in touch and we’ll help you build solutions for greater insights into your business, and provide you with reliable metrics for your sustainability processes.