Dashpivot Article – What is a Journey Management Plan?

What is a Journey Management Plan?

A journey management plan is essentially a procedure with associated documentation designed to mitigate the risks associated with travel and transportation in environments where safety and efficiency are important, which are typically industrial style environments.

What is a journey management plan is a question that a lot of industrial companies have been asking in recent years, with increased legislation around journey management forcing companies to improve their journey plans and procedures.

Journey management plans, as well as other safety processes (e.g toolbox talks) ensure companies meet their compliance requirements and industry standards, whilst also building a culture of safety amongst the workforce which ultimately results in less incidents and issues.

Journey management plans are extensions of other safety documents and processes like risk assessments and job safety analyses, but they are focused on and specific to journeys and moving from A to B.

What is Required in a Journey Management Plan?

A good journey management plan will force the driver/person aligning with the plan to identify potential hazards, assess risks, and implement control strategies that ensure all journeys are conducted safely and effectively.

By considering common risk factors such as weather conditions, travel distances, vehicle conditions, and driver fatigue, the plan aims to minimise the likelihood of accidents and incidents that could disrupt operations and pose a threat to people, goods and services.

Most of the requirements of a journey management plan can be found in a standard journey management plan template like this, and there will typically be journey specific hazards based on a company's geography, what they are transporting, the nature of this journey, the nature of the vehicle etc.

It's important to make your plans hyper relevant, so they are effective.

A dedicated H&S person will often drive the contents of the journey management plan and enforce participation and monitoring, with the team simply performing the plans prior to departure

While

Journey management plan overview/instructions
Pre trip check
Risk assessment
Route and schedule details for review
Key controls
Emergency arranegments
Comments and communication

You can see an example of this structure below.

Preview the full example

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What is the best way to manage journey management plans?

After being able to answer the question, what is a journey management plan, the typical next question is, well how do we best create and manage these plans.

Companies where journey management plans are applicable typically do a lot of journeys, and have large fleets of vehicles and large groups of drivers - so how can you manage distributing, monitoring and storing all of these plans.

The answer is that you can streamline journey management plans with a journey management system. A system like this enables you to share/deploy the latest plan/s to your team no matter where they are.

They can enter details into the plan structure, do their pre start and risk checks, and then enter details into the plan as they travel.

All these details will be synced back to the office, and then stored in a database for safety record keeping for compliance etc.

This approach eliminates the paper forms, delays in data, and ultimately removes any chance that critical safety information is left to rot in the truck/car etc. once the journey has ended.

Journey management plans and other safety processes are here to stay, so you need to stay up-to-date with the latest legislation, requirements and tools to manage these requirements.

None of these exercises are designed to be tick and flick. They are designed to have an impact on safety KPIs and safety outcomes in high risk jobs and activities, including journey management.