Lincoln Hill Retirement Community is a center offering affordable living, meals, room rentals and organized activities for seniors in Stanwood, Washington. An important service the community offers is transportation, helping seniors in Stanwood and surrounding communities north of Seattle get to places they need or want to go. This is especially important for older adults who may be isolated because they no longer drive.
For the folks managing the Lincoln Hill transportation program, a smooth operation means keeping track of its small fleet of cars, passenger vans and transit vans and making sure pickups and drop-offs are on time. It also means knowing their team of drivers is driving safely, and that vehicle maintenance is up to date.
To help with these matters, Lincoln Hill Retirement Community relies on the fleet management power of Verizon Connect Reveal.
Timely, safe transportation crucial for seniors
Like the many other services it provides to seniors, safe and on-time transportation is a linchpin for Lincoln Hill Retirement Community. It’s the only way for some seniors in the Stanwood area to travel to vital meetings and appointments and other social events they otherwise couldn’t attend.
Danielle Corbett, Transportation Lead for Lincoln Hill, said she organizes and dispatches the fleet with efficiency in mind. She said she needs to know the location of every vehicle in Lincoln Hill’s transportation fleet so she can accurately estimate arrival times and adjust the routes if needed.
“If I receive a call asking for an ETA, I need to know where our drivers are with our clients,” she said.
Corbett said the transportation program’s drivers are coached to operate cautiously in traffic, and that safe driving habits are essential, emphasized and constantly encouraged. Cautious driving not only promotes safety, she said. It also takes less of a toll on the vehicles.
And, with Lincoln Hill Retirement Community's badging, emblems and phone number printed on the side of every vehicle in the fleet, the program’s reputation for reliability and safety is always up for public scrutiny as long as the cars and vans are on the road.
In fact, Corbett said the program’s vehicles have been targeted for fraudulent claims of liability in accidents and other incidents while operating in the field. In such cases, the Lincoln Hill transportation team needed a way to gather the facts about what happened to either debunk or take responsibility for the claim.
Reveal keeps drivers on the right track
Lincoln Hill Retirement Community deploys Verizon Connect Reveal to tackle the myriad challenges facing its transportation program.
Verizon Connect Reveal is an intuitive, cloud-based fleet management system that offers a near-real-time, 360-degree view of a fleet’s daily operations. The GPS tracking and high-resolution maps of Reveal allow Lincoln Hill’s transportation program managers to not only monitor the location of their vehicles in the field but also collect data pertinent to how the vehicles are being operated.
Having adopted Verizon Connect Reveal recently, the Lincoln Hill transportation team already has embraced several of the tools Reveal offers, including:
- Vehicle Tracking Units (VTUs) to show the location, near-real-time route information and accurate estimated times of arrival for every vehicle in the fleet. VTUs also help prevent unauthorized out-of-area use of the vehicles through geofencing.
- Dashcams to provide near-real-time, unbiased video of activity around the vehicle, including harsh driving events; and to mitigate risk and liability in cases of accidents or other reported incidents.
- In-cab alerts to help drivers perform safely, economically and efficiently.
- Data to track fuel usage, idling times and other operational details to help transportation managers run the program more effectively and coach drivers to operate more safely and efficiently.
“Before we had Reveal, I had a lot of drivers sitting in place and didn’t know where they were,” Corbett said. “Now, I can see where they are. I can ask, ‘Why have you been sitting in one place for so long?’ It’s just an easier way for us now to keep track of where they are that we didn’t have before.”
Raising the level of accountability
Corbett said she already is seeing the benefits of having Verizon Connect Reveal in place, especially when it comes to developing a culture of accountability. She said the transportation program sets speeding thresholds and alerts for things like fast accelerating, harsh braking, rolling stops and distracted driving.
One of the drivers on the team is showing a new level of conscientiousness regarding their personal performance on the job.
“I’ve had to bring one driver in a couple of times, and as soon as he walks through my door, he’s like, ‘OK, what did I do this time?’” she said. “I reminded him that we’re monitoring the drivers. I showed him what went on and he was like, ‘OK, yeah, my bad.’”
Tracking data from Reveal came in handy recently when a person called the center to complain that one of Lincoln Hill Retirement Community’s vehicles had cut them off.
“We went back to try to find out what happened,” Corbett said. “We had the location and all the information. Reveal helped because it showed we had no vehicles around the time she tried to claim that she got cut off.”
With even more tools built into the Reveal platform, Corbett said she is looking forward to tapping into more features of the software to help monitor important program data like annual fuel consumption, regular maintenance records and hours of service for drivers.
“It’s still kind of new to us. We’re still playing around with it,” she said. “The most important reason we got the tracking system and cameras is to know where the vehicles are with the customers, and also protect the drivers in case people are making false claims against them.”
“So far, we’re getting a lot of use out of it.”
