How can you reconcile the costs of compliance with the need to return a profit?

Some of the country’s leading executives offered their insights on the subject at the recent Ontario Trucking Association CEO Forum.

Here’s what they had to say:

Claude Robert, Robert Transport: I want to be able to sleep at night. You want to comply because you want to make sure that never, ever is one of your drivers involved in anything because of you not doing your job. It is also a measure of quality. There is no way around it and it starts from the top. There are not two ways of filling out a logbook, or driving truck, or doing maintenance. If you invest in safety and security, in the short term costs will go up. But over the long term you will be making all the right decisions to reduce your costs. If you don’t know the cost of something you do nothing to correct it. But once you invest in maintenance to comply with regulations, then you start to spec your vehicle differently. There will come a time that you will see that it’s cheaper to be compliant. A lot of people think that it’s more costly but I don’t think that’s true.

Don Streuber, Bison Transport: The best thing we can do for our drivers is respect them. And how can you respect your drivers when you ask them to run illegal? How can you respect your driver when you accept not following the rules as part of your culture? Complying is simply one of the business factors we have to deal with. It’s no different than changing equipment costs, maintenance costs or insurance costs. It’s simply a cost of production. If we know our cost we can go to our customers and price our service at a level that allows us to be profitable, compliant and respectful to our drivers.

Gary Babcock, Quik X Transportation: The cost of compliance is rather simple to figure out. How many of us would be around without a CVOR? Non-compliance leads to the loss of your CVOR. It behooves all of us to be as safe as we can be. Money spent on compliance is money well spent.