Managing Driver Fatigue

If your day-to-day business operations include having staff driving your vehicles on the NZ roads, it’s essential that you play an active part in managing the fatigue of drivers to minimise the risk of a fatigue-related motor accident.

For some organisations this is a legal requirement, for others, it’s something they voluntarily choose to pursue, but in all cases, it’s a social responsibility of an organisation to ensure that their drivers are in a fit state to operate vehicles on the roads, as failure to do so could cause injury or loss of life to their staff as well as the general public and also result in a fine for both the driver and organisation.

How to Manage Driver Fatigue?

The Argus Tracking platform comes equipped with two purpose-built reports inside the Health and Safety family of reports to manage driver fatigue, which are available for your use on the MIDI plan or above.

Daily Fatigue Report.

The daily fatigue report is designed to manage the total drive time for any vehicle/driver in each day. If a driver’s day is made up of many small to medium-length trips, it’s often easy to overlook the actual time spent driving in a day and thus overlook the risk of a fatigue-related vehicle accident. Using this report, you can set a ‘drive time limit’ in hours, and report on vehicles that were travelling on the road longer than the set value, and will quickly be able to identify vehicles/drivers’ daily drive time is greater than your defined acceptable time.

Follow the steps below to run a Daily Fatigue Report:

Step 1 

From the sidebar, select Reporting.

Step 2

Under Health & Safety Reporting, select Daily Fatigue Report.

Step 3

Select the asset, or group of assets you wish to report on.

Step 4

Select the date range on which you wish to report.

Step 5

Select the format in which you want the report to be generated.

Step 6

Enter the ‘drive time limit’ – this is the maximum hours per day spent driving which is acceptable in your organisation.

Step 7

Click the blue Run Report button. The report generated will then display all cases of vehicles that exceed the limit, detailing the registration and label of the vehicle, the date on which the limit was exceeded, your defined maximum daily drive time, the total drive time of that vehicle on that day, and how far this exceeded your defined limit.

Fatigue Trip Report

In some cases, the total drive time per day of a vehicle/driver may be considered acceptable in respect of company policy or legal requirements, but the amount of time spent driving without rest in a trip is not. This is what the fatigue trip report is designed to identify – you tell the system what the maximum time spent driving without rest is, and it will tell you if there are any cases that exceed this limit.

Follow the steps below to run a Fatigue Trip Report:

Step 1

From the sidebar, select Reporting.

Step 2

Under Health & Safety Reporting, select Fatigue Trip Report.

Step 3

Select the asset, or group of assets you wish to report on.

Step 4

Select the date range which you wish to report.

Step 5

Select the format in which you want the report to be generated.

Step 6

Enter in the ‘drive time limit’ – this is the maximum number of hours that an asset should drive in one go without rest.

Step 7

Click the blue Run Report button. The report generated will then display all cases of vehicles that exceed the limit, detailing the registration and label of the vehicle, your defined maximum trip time, the actual trip duration, the amount of time the trip exceeded your defined threshold, the driver name (if using driver login for shared vehicles), the trip start and end times, the departure and arrival addresses, and the distance between these locations.

The utilisation of these reports will help you effectively and efficiently manage driver fatigue, which is not only a legal requirement but a social responsibility to protect your staff as well as the general population.

If you have any other questions about these reports or would like any further guidance on how to manage the safety of your fleet, please get in touch with your Account Manager at [e-mail] and they will be happy to assist you.