When it comes to the world of motor carrier safety enforcement and measurement, there are many different and sometimes confusing components.

The Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) evaluates motor carrier safety in seven areas called Behavior Analysis and Safety Improvement Categories or BASICs. These BASICs affect whether commercial vehicle enforcement agencies come knocking on a carrier’s door.

BASICs also affect a carrier’s safety rating under the Compliance, Safety, Accountability program, commonly known as CSA. Plus, BASICs go into FMCSA’s calculation of each carrier’s Inspection Selection System (ISS) score. State agencies use ISS scores to determine which trucking companies and trucks would benefit from roadside inspections.

Good ISS scores also help carriers to qualify for and continue to participate in an electronic weigh station bypass program like PrePass.

Seem confusing? You’re not alone. If you’re having problems understanding how these scores work or are having trouble improving your safety scores, a new series of whitepapers from PrePass can help. Download “BASICs – Improving Vehicle Maintenance.”

In this whitepaper you will learn about the BASICs, the ISS calculation, and what an “alert” means in any category. In particular, the whitepaper reveals four key aspects of ISS score calculation you need to understand – aspects that offer the potential to improve your score in any BASIC.

Motor carriers experience the most frequent shortcomings in the Vehicle Maintenance BASIC category. Many in the trucking industry think of vehicle maintenance as an issue for mechanics and equipment technicians, or may be just a matter of checking the brakes, lights and tires. This PrePass whitepaper describes how good vehicle maintenance requires a whole team effort, starting at the top with management.

“What Carriers Need to Know About SMS BASICs – Vehicle Maintenance BASIC” also offers specific maintenance tips for team members including drivers, dispatchers and, of course, equipment technicians:

  • Drivers will learn which vehicle inspections must be performed and why they should report all inspection results to management, even when a report is not required by federal regulation.
  • Dispatchers will learn to act as air traffic controllers, allowing only safe, repaired trucks to take off.
  • Equipment technicians will understand which repairs take priority and why items that are not safety or compliance related can still trigger a roadside inspection.

Each section of this whitepaper concludes with a quick quiz and some helpful hints to improve motor carrier scores in the important Vehicle Maintenance BASIC.

Start working to improve your SMS BASICs by downloading “BASICs – Improving Vehicle Maintenance.”

You can download the other whitepapers in this series by going to the PrePass Resource Library.