On today’s podcast, we will be discussing hours of service. We will provide a template to help you educate your drivers on your hours of service policy. On top of that, we will help you make sure you are ready for any audit that may come your way.
An audit can happen if your safer rating is not up to national standards. In that event, the DOT will review your number to see if you are meeting all necessary industry standards. There are also caveats that you need to take into account to maximize efficiency.
Your drivers must know that they can not drive more than 11 hours in a 24 hour period, and they must have a ten consecutive hour off-duty period. It is possible to split the 10 hours so long as one block is at least 2 hours and the other segment has at least seven consecutive hours in the sleeper berth. Total sleeper berth pairings must be at least 10 hours.
When onboarding drivers, it is essential to go through the document and go over your offense and write-up policy. Our policy is as follows: the first offense is a write-up and retraining, the second offense is a write-up and a one-day suspension, the third offense is a write-up, fine, and weeklong suspension, and the fourth offense is termination.
Most hours of service issues come from personal conveyance, which is often misconstrued and abused. The purpose of personal conveyance for situations similar to the following. Your driver is on the highway 20min from a truck stop in bad weather. It is not for if you’re running overtime and you need to make a dropoff. We recommend banning personal conveyance as a matter of policy. That means it cannot be abused, and in the case of an audit, you will be more than above board. There are some circumstances wherein using it would be very helpful, but we recommend having your drivers call and ask for an exception to the rule.
It is our opinion that Keep Truckin is the best ELD provider. Their online portal is simple to use. On top of that, if you need to use a sub-unit (a truck you are renting while your leased truck is down) you can go to almost any truck stop and find a Keep Truckin ELD. For this reason, Keep Truckin has our strong recommendation.
On top of their ubiquity, we recommend them because we like their open API as a Software As A Service (SAAS) company. That has facilitated our integration of the Keep Truckin ELD into Truck Hub. That allows you to get the same information while having fewer tabs open.
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