Welcome to article six of ten in this series on trucking company safety systems! Up to now, we have discussed the importance of taking a systematic approach to achieving compliance and improving safety, examined the role different people play in safety systems, and dived into specific arms of the overarching carrier safety system.

This article will describe the role that driver files play in the safety management system of a carrier. While the maintenance of accurate and up-to-date driver files might be viewed as nothing more than an exercise in basic compliance, there is more to driver files than meets the eye.

Driver files are a tangible representation of a system. Multiple roles and processes mesh to produce the ordered collection of data contained within a driver file, and by auditing driver files, safety system efficacy can be assessed. This is part of the reason why compliance audits - both internal and external - examine the contents of a carrier’s driver files: missing documentation is indicative of failures throughout the safety management system.

Many carriers spend considerable time on maintaining driver files, and the driver file is sometimes thought of simply as a place where documents go to wait for some uncertain future audit. It is true that these files are repositories for important documentation that forms an important part of a compliance audit, and I will provide a short section on the minimum items required in a driver file in Alberta. However, my main focus here is to shift such a mentality to one where driver files are seen as a valuable resource from which important data can be extracted to guide and improve operations.