The carrier embraces Tenstreet to better track its driver files, reduce risk, and dramatically cut costs.
As Roadrunner has transformed itself over the past three years, Tenstreet has been at the heart of the carrier’s safety and compliance overhaul.
The trucking company turned to Tenstreet’s Safety Management platform to better track its drivers’ qualifications and violations, identify and reduce risk, and drastically cut costs in accident claims and insurance premiums.
From around 2017 to 2019, Roadrunner was on shaky ground. The carrier had acquired more than two dozen smaller trucking companies, each of which maintained its own Department of Transportation number as well as its own policies, procedures, and training. Records were scattered across a variety of systems and paper files, and many essential items — such as driver qualification files and electronic logging data — were incomplete or missing.
“Each company did its own thing, and safety got lost somewhere,” says Dawn Johnston, today’s vice president of safety and risk management for Roadrunner.
In 2020, Roadrunner decided to return to its roots. The carrier divested all 25 of the smaller companies it had acquired and narrowed its focus back to less-than-truckload freight shipping, known as LTL, which has long been Roadrunner’s wheelhouse.
Roadrunner’s insurance provider brought in Johnston, a 30- year transportation veteran who started her career in a military motor pool and has a long track record of helping to turn around struggling trucking companies. She puts a personal perspective on safety and compliance.
“My family is driving down the road next to these trucks, and everybody deserves to get there safely,” Johnston says. “We have to make sure bad driving behaviors stay out of the trucks.”
To that end, Johnston and Roadrunner’s new leadership harnessed the Tenstreet platform to clean up the company’s driver qualification files — and to weed out the bad apples.
DRIVER ASSESSMENT REDUCES RISK
Roadrunner’s corporate office is located in Downers Grove, Illinois, and its motor carrier authority is registered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
When Johnston joined the company in November 2021, Roadrunner had contracts with about 1,000 independent truck operators, with about half driving local routes and the other half driving line haul. Roadrunner doesn’t employ any company drivers, relying instead on owner-operators.
To assess the safety and compliance records of those independent drivers, Johnston turned to Tenstreet.
Tenstreet integrates Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) data, pulling drivers’ personal Compliance, Safety, Accountability (CSA) scores into the Tenstreet dashboard daily.
Johnston used Tenstreet to compile a list of the CSA scores of Roadrunner’s entire driver roster to identify those with the highest risk based on their records. CSA scores operate on a scale from zero to 100, where higher scores correspond to weaker performance records.
The list that Johnston pulled showed some startlingly high numbers — with many over 90. Roadrunner decided to terminate the contracts of all owner-operators who had a CSA score higher than 40. As a result, approximately 150 drivers were let go.
The company also tightened its driver qualifications to bring down CSA scores and BASICS — FMCSA’s Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Category percentiles that rate carriers in areas like unsafe driving, driver fitness, and hours-of-service compliance.
“We were rejecting more applicants than we were onboarding, but it worked to improve our safety record,” Johnston says.
COMPREHENSIVE COMPLIANCE SOLUTIONS
One of the critical components of compliance is driver qualification files, or DQFs. On that front, Tenstreet’s Enhanced DQF helps carriers stay compliant with a host of features, including:
- Going paperless with digital driver files
- Tracking missing and expired documents
- Sending digital certification of violations (COVs) to drivers
- Ordering motor records (MVRs) in bulk
- Capturing required commercial driver licenses (CDLs)
- Creating custom alerts for drivers and safety managers
Tenstreet’s reports shed further light on Roadrunner’s drivers. Johnston looked at how a variety of factors correlated to violation rates, such as age group and experience, then further fine-tuned the company’s driver qualifications.
For example, Roadrunner’s hours of service BASIC was 11 percentage points over FMCSA’s threshold, so the company adjusted accordingly.
“We tweaked our driver qualifications to not let anyone in who has hours of service violations,” Johnston says. “We needed to drive that down.”
Roadrunner was also saddled with a “ long tail” of driver violations, as Johnston puts it, that affected the company’s rating for 24 months. But little by little, “due to Tenstreet and my team watching it,” Johnston says, the company’s numbers improved.
“Now 78% of our drivers have a CSA score of zero, which means they have had no accidents or violations in the past three years,” Johnston says.
Also, Roadrunner’s driver fitness BASIC dropped below the threshold, which meant the company could carefully loosen some of its qualifications as it works to replace the 150 drivers it terminated. On that front, Tenstreet’s comprehensive recruiting solutions are also helping the company refill its ranks with qualified drivers.
Meanwhile, Roadrunner has tapped into other Tenstreet features to bolster safety, including driver training and integrating footage from onboard cameras.
Johnston started requiring her safety coordinators to call the drivers they oversee weekly to ensure they stay in communication around safety and the goals of the business.
“The discussion notes from those meetings flow directly into Tenstreet, and now we have a record of what they said, whether it was positive or negative, and whether it’s something they’ve talked to the driver about multiple times,” Johnston says.
BETTER RECORDKEEPING DRIVES DRAMATIC SAVINGS
Tenstreet has also helped Roadrunner get a better handle on its accident records, which in turn has drastically decreased the amount of money the company is paying out in claims.
Tenstreet’s Safety Management platform provides internal accident and incident forms that streamline data to an accident registry report, giving carriers a high-level, cumulative view of their drivers’ accidents.
By contrast, when Johnston came on board at Roadrunner, a staff member had been logging accidents in a spreadsheet, which hadn’t been updated in about eight months. Johnston says she and her team worked “almost around the clock” to bring the company’s records into compliance.
“Now we put all accidents that are recordable into our accident file in Tenstreet,” Johnston says. “That helped reduce our crash rating.”
The claims management service in Tenstreet’s Safety Management platform enables carriers to capture more than 50 different fields, such as road condition, road type, and weather. Integration with CSA and telematics data can also empower carriers to resolve claims more easily.
For Roadrunner, managing accident data with Tenstreet has delivered dramatic cost savings over the past year. In 2022, the company’s accident claims cost an average of $33,000 per claim. This year, the average cost is down to $4,700 per claim — an 86% decrease.
Johnston attributes that stunning drop to the company’s compliance overhaul that Tenstreet has facilitated.
“Now we can defend ourselves, because we’ve gotten on top of our compliance and accident management,” Johnston says. “If you don’t have the compliance piece in place, then your defense counsel has no leg to stand on.”
Tenstreet has also helped boost Roadrunner’s bottom line through subrogation — recouping money from past accidents for which the company had paid claims unnecessarily.
Johnston tasked one of her team members with searching the accident registry in Tenstreet for any claims for which the police report found Roadrunner’s drivers not at fault. That search turned up 56 claims from the past year that the company can subrogate on, which Johnston estimates will recover about $1.8 million.
The savings don’t end there. Armed with the solid compliance program that Tenstreet has helped Roadrunner put in place, Johnston met with the company’s insurance provider last year before it was time to renew the policy.
The insurance provider offered Roadrunner a three-year policy that would reduce the trucking carrier’s premium by $2.9 million per year — a total savings of $8.7 million over the three-year term. Again, Johnston credits Tenstreet with making that deal possible.
TAKEAWAYS
“Tenstreet is the start of our compliance program, and I sold the insurance provider our vision,” Johnston says. “There’s huge cost savings for carriers when they utilize this system.”
In all, Johnston estimates that Tenstreet has helped Roadrunner secure savings of about $10 million so far.
Audits are another key area of improvement for the carrier. Before fully implementing Tenstreet, Roadrunner had struggled to meet the demands of FMCSA audits. Now, with its solid standing on compliance — and with Johnston’s experience and positive perspective — the company is in a much better position.
“I’ve always embraced audits — they tell you where your gaps are and can help you improve,” Johnston says. “Today, Roadrunner could be audit ready in 24 hours.”
For other trucking companies that are looking to bolster safety and compliance, ditch pen and paper, and embrace a comprehensive digital solution, Johnston recommends Tenstreet.
ABOUT ROADRUNNER
Roadrunner provides high quality, scalable LTL freight services to shippers in major metros across the US. Their LTL carrier services are powered by over 900 dependable independent contractors who are eager to deliver freight to where it needs to go. Through 21 brick and mortar service centers, strategic rail partnerships and over 100+ pickup and delivery partners, Roadrunner ships to all major cities in the US.
