FMCSA is committed to saving additional lives on our nation’s highways. Two new initiatives described in this issue of Highlights demonstrate FMCSA’s strategy of continuing to use proven methods while developing and implementing new approaches. (Photo by Julie Nixon)
FMCSA—Two Modernizing Safety Initiatives: COMPASS and CSA 2010
Smart Data Drives Motor Carrier Safety
The primary mission of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) is to reduce crashes, injuries, and fatalities involving large trucks and buses. FMCSA relies on dozens of information technology systems to help achieve its mission. The Volpe Center has played a key role in defining, developing, implementing, and supporting information systems for FMCSA. The Center is therefore well positioned to support FMCSA in two distinct but interrelated modernization initiatives.
First, in FY2003, FMCSA initiated Comprehensive Safety Analysis (CSA) 2010, an ambitious program to realign, strengthen, consolidate, and focus its safety programs and enforcement operations.
Second, FMCSA is designing and implementing COMPASS, a large reengineering and systems modernization project aimed at fully aligning information technology (IT) operations with business practices as well as creating a foundation for subsequent IT enhancements.
This Focus article describes the Volpe Center's role in each of these initiatives and the potential synergy between them.
Comprehensive Safety Analysis (CSA) 2010
CSA 2010 is not a stand-alone initiative but rather a comprehensive safety analysis involving the entire agency in a collaborative effort. The concept behind it is to respond to unsafe behavior before it becomes chronic and habitual, utilizing a range of safety interventions beyond the current enforcement process to increase effectiveness and make better use of resources.
The Volpe Center is part of a technical team developing a new operational model that will employ these new safety improvement tools for drivers and motor carriers. The technical team will also oversee an extensive field test of the new operational model prior to national deployment.
Improving the Odds
Current FMCSA compliance and safety programs focus on the compliance review, an audit-based, labor-intensive enforcement process. A compliance review is an on-site examination of a motor carrier’s records and operations to determine whether the carrier meets the safety-fitness standard of the Administration. FMCSA expects that— through education, heightened awareness of safety regulations, and the enforcement effects of compliance reviews—motor carriers will improve the safety of their commercial vehicle operations and ultimately reduce the number and severity of crashes in which they are involved.
Thousands of these reviews are conducted each year, accounting for one of the single greatest resource-consuming activities of FMCSA. With 600,000 trucking companies operating in the United States, FMCSA is able to perform only about 15,000 reviews per year, representing just 2.5 percent of carrier companies. With CSA 2010, FMCSA is shifting from a one-size-fits-all approach to a more targeted, focused method that will be more efficient and effective. Improved efficiency will allow FMCSA to directly address a larger portion of the carrier population. Data derived from roadside inspection programs will determine where inspectors will concentrate their activity.
Building Consensus for Change: Compliance Review Workgroup
The Volpe Center played a lead role in the Compliance Review Workgroup, which was convened as part of FMCSA’s effort to improve its ability to ensure the safety and compliance of the motor carrier industry. The workgroup eventually proposed a flexible operational model for FMCSA’s safety programs, directed at improving safety performance and minimizing high-risk behavior in the motor carrier industry. The proposed operational model forms the basis of the CSA 2010 initiative.
Key elements of this operational model include:
Better Diagnosis of Safety Issues. A new safety measurement system will be introduced to quantify and categorize safety performance such that safety problems can be addressed in a more focused manner. The new safety measurement system for CSA 2010 will differentiate between motor carriers that have problems in the area of fatigued drivers versus problems in vehicle maintenance and then allow for solutions that are more tailored to the safety problem.
From “Auditor” to “Safety Improvement Specialist.” Ways to improve safety are evolving, from relying on penalties to identifying unsafe behavior before it becomes chronic. The new focus will be on education and intervention. This means that the role of field inspector will change from that of auditor and penalizer to that of safety improvement specialist. The best test of any safety initiative is whether participants decrease their crashes, and a goal of CSA 2010 is to find creative ways to persuade trucking companies and operators to operate more safely.
Strict Enforcement When All Else Fails. While CSA 2010 is focused on safety improvement, the operational model will also incorporate a formal determination of a carrier’s overall safety fitness that considers safety performance, regulatory compliance, and safety management. Carriers that are determined to be “unfit” will have their operations suspended.
The Volpe Center’s work on CSA 2010 and COMPASS builds on the work we have done in developing and maintaining existing systems as well as ongoing analysis of FMCSA data. The interrelationship and synergy between these groups facilitates discussions on key issues that are relevant to FMCSA. This shared institutional knowledge benefits each program.
FMCSA COMPASS
Road conditions and weather can create challenges for motor vehicle drivers. (©istockphoto.com)
The Volpe Center is also supporting FMCSA in a massive effort known as COMPASS, aimed at modernizing the agency’s IT processes. COMPASS represents a technology strategy—a total decision about the way that data will be made available. FMCSA recognizes that older technology must be updated or replaced and that the current system architecture, which consists of multiple stand-alone databases requiring numerous user IDs and passwords, must be redesigned to make it more streamlined, cohesive, and accessible.
COMPASS will improve the public’s access to data and will provide easier access for FMCSA staff as well. FMCSA plans to retire and replace existing systems and to transition the organization to a fully service-oriented architecture Web-based environment. A key component of this architecture will be an enterprise Web portal, where all the existing systems will be redesigned and accessible.
A long-term goal of COMPASS is business transformation. COMPASS will improve the delivery of services, responding dynamically to evolving business requirements and more tightly integrating and aligning business processes with IT systems.
FMCSA Web Portal
The Web portal will be a crucial element of FMCSA’s IT modernization, functioning as a single, integrated point of access to the agency’s content, applications, and processes both internally and externally. It will present timely, accurate data from diverse sources. It will also help FMCSA field workers to operate more efficiently both individually and collaboratively.
The Web portal will have the ability to handle thousands of user requests. It will also facilitate communication between FMCSA, carriers, other industry partners, and the general public.
The Volpe Center’s Role
FMCSA has evolved over time, with many of its systems and databases responding to the changing needs of the agency. As new architecture is developed, existing systems will be incorporated. The Volpe Center is playing a key role in adapting and coding current systems to interface with COMPASS. To date, four of the existing systems—the Motor Carrier Management Information System (MCMIS), the Enforcement Management Information System (EMIS), the Data Challenge System (DataQs), and the Licensing and Insurance System (L&I)—have been recoded and transferred to the new system (see sidebar).
The current strategy consists of a phased approach in which existing systems will be adapted with a “wraparound” that will initially make them accessible through the new portal system. Eventually, these older systems will be replaced and incorporated into the new architecture. Volpe will continue to be the host for all of these new systems and will hopefully be named the provider for maintaining the new systems code.
The Center is also hosting and maintaining FMCSA data required for the new systems and supporting the installation of almost two dozen new servers. In addition, the Center runs a help desk. The Volpe Center Help Desk focuses on the support of the FMCSA systems for federal partners only. With the new system will come a new database approach. The new “enterprise database” will incorporate the data warehouse technology.
Business-Process Modernization
COMPASS and CSA 2010 share the goal of optimizing FMCSA resources and providing a broader range of enforcement interventions. Both are ultimately concerned with business-process reengineering. CSA 2010 is aimed at changing the agency’s focus from the enforcement of regulations to identifying and decreasing specific unsafe behaviors, thus targeting available resources in the most effective manner. Although the initial focus of COMPASS is on supporting the current model by updating the system architecture, its ultimate goal is a total business transformation, whereby IT operations and business processes are fully aligned. One of its key goals is to support the CSA 2010 business strategies and operational model.
The Volpe Center understands the interdependence of these two approaches and is well positioned to be part of the creative dialogue between all of the partners in the transformation. Center staff have long-term experience in addressing requirements for enforcement and safety improvements as well as in building an IT infrastructure to support these needs.