Training Builds the Habit. Data Should Help It Stick.
For more than 70 years, Smith System has taught drivers to Aim High in Steering. More than half the Fortune 500 have trained their drivers on the Smith5Keys®.
On October 13, we hosted Introducing Smith5Keys® Driver Risk Management, a live webinar with CEO Derek Dunaway. Derek started with where Smith System stands today: part of almost every fleet's safety program, but not the program itself.
Here are a few highlights. Watch the full recording on demand.
Two languages, one goal
Crashes cost U.S. employers $72.2 billion a year. Monitoring technology can show what happened on the road, but technology observes behavior. It doesn't change it.
Part of the reason is that training and monitoring speak two different languages:
- Training speaks behaviors: Aim High in Steering. Keep Your Eyes Moving. Leave Yourself an Out.
- Monitoring speaks events: Harsh brake detected. Speeding score: 72. Following distance alert.
Both have the same goal: safer drivers. But there's no common language to get there. Many fleets will recognize the signs: drivers who learned the 5Keys getting coached on a harsh event score, a backlog of unreviewed alerts, and no clear answer when leadership asks whether any of it is working.
Everyone's selling half the loop
Training providers stop at the classroom, with no data to show whether the training stuck. Monitoring providers stop at the alert. They measure the vehicle, not the driver, and with hundreds of events a week, supervisors stop reading them.
Derek also called out what he sees as the most dangerous idea in the market: that coaching can replace training. Coaching without a foundation has nothing to build on. NETS 2025 benchmarking supports the point: fleets with in-person behind-the-wheel training had about 3 points lower crash exposure than remote-only fleets.
Six parts. One platform. One language.
Over the past three years, Smith System acquired a company built around driver evaluation, monitoring and incentives, along with Utilimarc, a leader in fleet performance analytics and benchmarking. Then we built 5Keys Driver Risk Management with our customers through advisory boards, pilots and interviews.
We're not becoming a telematics company. We're the company that makes your telematics change driver behavior.
The program runs on the 5Keys Engage Platform and connects six parts: 5Keys Training, Driver Compliance, Monitoring, Analytics, Coaching & Reinforcement and the 5Keys Score.
The 5Keys Score ties them together, and it isn't a lookup table. A hard brake doesn't automatically mean one Key. In the webinar, Derek shows how the same hard brake can point to three different habits, and three different coaching conversations.
Three fleets. Three results.
- Consistency: 38% fewer preventable accidents in two years at a national retailer that once had 22 distribution centers running safety 22 different ways.
- Speed: a measurable drop in safety events in 8 weeks for a fleet of 1,480 drivers.
- Scale: 30x program expansion after year one at an MRO distributor.
Different industries, same pattern: when training, data and coaching speak one language, the results follow.
Is your safety investment connected?
Derek closed with a challenge for every fleet. In the recording, you'll learn the five questions that show whether your training, monitoring and coaching are working together. Every "no" is a gap between what you've invested and what you're getting back.
You'll also see how the 5Keys Score works and walk through a sample driver profile.
Ready to see where your own loop breaks? Request a closed-loop assessment, ROI model, live demo or pilot program.
Crashes aren't accidents. They're predictable and preventable.
