The FMCSA recently unveiled its newly updated Safety Management System, or SMS.

What does that mean for you?

Well, for starters, the changes to the FMCSA SMS website mean it will be more intuitive and user-friendly.

The FMCSA also:

  • clarifies the SMS system's purpose
  • helps carriers understand what they need to do to improve CSA scores with access to greater safety and compliance data and performance monitoring tools
  • improves brokers', shippers', insurance companies', and other stakeholders' understanding of what those CSA scores really mean in the first place
  • consolidates safety information, so carriers and drivers don't have to "site hop"
  • does a better job correlating CSA violations and crash risk

The changes don't, however, impact SMS methodology or your safety score.

In short: it's all about smarter information design and access to more and better information, making it easier to find what you're looking for and to come to the correct conclusions.

So, what is the purpose of the SMS website?

The FMCSA wants to make one thing abundantly clear: CSA, and the SMS website, are about identifying carriers who need corrective intervention from enforcement officials-it's not a safety rating system.

What changes did the FMCSA make to the SMS website?

The biggies? Let's take a look…

  • Individual carrier performance measures are now displayed based on their own absolute data. That means you'll not only find your score, but how measure was created (based on severity weight and time, divided by the average power unit and utilization factor). With each click, you can dig deeper into the math behind each score. (This is in addition to percentile rankings, which measure one carrier against other similarly sized carriers.).
  • You can now download the carriers in your safety event group, allowing you to see, by name, the carriers that are making up your relative rankings with their safety scores.
  • Carrier enforcement histories are displayed, including associated fines and violations
  • Inspection breakdowns are shown. Now, you'll see both the total number of inspections and the number of inspections that resulted in violations.
  • Out-of-service (OOS) rates prominently are displayed. That means driver, vehicle, and HazMat OOS rates appear at the top of the page, alongside national OOS rate averages.
  • CSA BASICs have been reordered. Now, categories that correlate tightly with crash risk appear first (from left to right).
  • SMS rankings have been removed from the summary page. These rankings, often called "CSA scores," now appear deeper in a carrier's profile.
  • Displays carrier's insurance and operating authority status.
  • Delivers carriers' their Inspection Selection System (ISS) info, including their ISS score, inspection recommendations, and the foundation for those recommendations.
Want to learn more about the SMS website changes?

The FMCSA will be hosting five webinars between Wednesday, August 20th and Thursday, August 28th.Unfortunately, all sessions quickly reached capacity.

The FMCSA plans to archive the webinar and make it publicly available, however. When that happens, we'll share the link here, as well as across our social media channels.

(In the webinar, the FMCSA will not only cover the changes to its updated SMS website, but it will walk through its new policy on adjudicated citations, created to improve both the quality and uniformity of its inspection violation data. Definitely worth checking out…)

Whoa, Nellie! Did we move too fast?

If you need to gain access to the SMS website (and your CSA scores) first, then check out this blog post for carrier CSA scores and this post for driver PSP reports. We'll take you through the process of gaining access one step at a time.

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