Driving Monitor have announced a series of live demonstrations across the UK to showcase the new eConsent paperless driving licence checking service. The live sessions will demonstrate how a fleet manager can now perform instant realtime checks on his fleet as soon as a driver enters their licence details. The new service is part of a series of first-to-market set of tools Driving Monitor have developed over the past few months.

Kevin Curtis, Managing Director of Driving Monitor commented, "The live demos will show first hand how simple and fast our new licence checking service runs. With the forthcoming counterpart abolition in June this year we feel that fleet managers need a simple and fast way of checking their employees' licences. The new eConsent system we have developed is a UK first and takes the administration away from collecting consent from drivers via the traditional paper route.

Our new eConsent system is called ePass (Electronic Permit and Safety System) and connects the driver consent with the new live realtime checking service we have recently launched. This means for the first time a manager can verify the status of their employees' licences within seconds. Traditionally we've had to rely on the DVLA ‘batch' processing model where we send a volume of licence checking data via a secure channel to the DVLA - and then wait for the ‘batch' of results to be returned.

The new platform has opened up a whole range of new services we can offer with instant real-time checks. We can also get instant results when a driver completes our Driving Monitor risk assessment profiler, meaning the DVLA data is right up-to-date allowing the risk assessment to be 100% accurate instantly. We have also recently tested the new realtime service against the current overnight batch service that we use via a secure DVLA link. Our results found that 100% of records that were previously suppressed via the overnight EDECs service were checked successfully via the new realtime service. This is a marked improvement on reducing the number of records that previously were held up by the DVLA if they were working on a licence. We can now use the new realtime service to reduce the number of blocked records."

Kevin Curtis went on to say, "One of the main areas of confusion we've found talking to customers is that the DVLA are releasing a similar service this summer. However there needs to be a distinction from the service that the DVLA are going to provide (to replace the counterpart once it's been removed) and the services that companies such as Driving Monitor offer fleet and Health & Safety managers. The new DVLA ‘Share My Licence' service that will be launched in the summer will only offer a single view approach and relies on the driver registering for the service using the government gateway ID verification platform. Once a driver has been through this process (10 mins) they would then activate a one-time use code for their employer to use. They would then need to print a form to give to their employer, which then starts the process of the employer needing to access the web service. The employer would then need to access the DVLA portal with the one-time use code to verify the driving licence (a further 5 mins).

What will become apparent very quickly is that employers will not want their drivers taking up valuable time going through an online approval process to register, then to generate a one-time use code that needs to be handed to the employer. Fleet managers also need to understand that the new DVLA service is not designed to give any ‘management' reporting or any view across more than one employee.

Driving Monitor offer a completely managed service, from collection of consent to full web dashboard and automated reports on licence status, points, categories and entitlements.

We find that when a company has more than a handful of drivers the need for an auditable report to cover their Duty of Care comes into play. Fleet managers are far more savvy these days and understand the importance of combining their licence checks with other safety checks such as risk assessments and telematics data. They are demanding integrated services to take the burden away from their admin teams and this is where companies such as Driving Monitor add real value.

With the costs of a driving licence check being relatively low it doesn't take long for a company manager to work out that trying to take on the administration of these services in-house soon costs more in staff admin time than using online services such as Driving Monitor.

We've taken the long-view when it comes to managing the Health & Safety of fleets said Kevin. Because the journey of risk management can start with many different points depending on the fleet, we've built a scalable secure web platform that allows a fleet manager to bolt-on services as they grow. The route a manager takes when looking at their Duty of Care tends to start from risk assessing their employees who drive for work, checking their licence and covering the legal checks on vehicles within their grey fleet. We've designed the system to handle the many different data points to give the manager one simple view across his drivers, so they can feel confident their corporate Duty of Care is fully covered."

Driving Monitor are giving these live demonstrations at the NEC in Birmingham 24th, 25, & 26th March 2015 at the Health & Safety show. Further demonstrations will be held at the Excel conference centre in London on 16th, 17th & 18th June 2015. For live session times and to register your place for the demos you can visit the events zone at www.DrivingMonitor.com/events. There's also a 7 Secrets to Licence Checks free guide that's been produced in conjunction with this new service rollout, which you can download from the DrivingMonitor.com website.

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About Driving Monitor
Driving Monitor are the UK's leading supplier of web-based driver risk management solutions. Setup in 2002 as a web platform for fleet managers, Driving Monitor gives business owners a full platform to cover their corporate Duty of Care. From driving licence checks, driver risk assessments and Grey Fleet checking - the system pulls together many different systems into one central platform giving managers simple dashboards to view their employees' driver risk rating.

For further information please contact:
Kevin Curtis
Driving Monitor
[email protected]