Over the past five years, the U.S. transportation industry has faced a noticeable rise in safety-related challenges. FMCSA reports a continued increase in violations and risk indicators across commercial fleets, while industry analyses point to higher accident severity and growing insurance costs. Many carriers struggle to pass FMCSA audits on the first attempt, resulting in fines, operational limitations, and the loss of key contracts.
Experts point to a core driver of this trend: a weakened safety culture inside companies that has not kept pace with business growth. Many carriers invest in equipment, expand their fleets, and build out routes, but underestimate the most vulnerable link, the human factor and the quality of internal processes.
Against this backdrop, the role is growing for professionals who can turn safety from a secondary function into the foundation of operational resilience. One of them is Yulia Shulpenkova. With more than a decade of experience in Illinois-based transportation companies, she learned to spot fleet vulnerabilities and make safety a working tool rather than a paper formality.
When Operational Resilience Depends on the Right Decisions
Yulia’s time at Success Carrier Inc. (2017–2020) made clear how sharply fleet growth can diverge from the quality of internal processes. The company ramped up volume quickly, while its safety system stayed at the same level. Violations repeated, reports were completed as a formality, and no one analyzed root causes. Driver briefings did not reflect real working conditions, and responsibilities were split across departments in a way that prevented data from coming together into a single system. As a result, even small mistakes in HOS led to disruptions and the risk of penalties.
Yulia saw that the problem was not people, but the lack of a structure capable of keeping processes under control. The paperwork was technically correct, but it did not make the fleet safer. Over time, she reached a conclusion that became the basis of her professional approach:
“Fleet safety is not a stack of documents. It is what determines a company’s resilience. Anything that isn’t controlled inevitably becomes a risk, for people, for business, for the economy.”
Yulia started by identifying why violations kept recurring and pinpointing where the process was breaking down. After analyzing the data, she saw when drivers most often made mistakes and which parts of routes created the most difficulty. The result: the company was effectively responding only to consequences, while the causes of violations went unaddressed.
Previously, HOS data, incident records, and ELD logs were reviewed once a month. Now they were checked daily. That made it possible to spot deviations quickly, correct operations, and prevent new mistakes. For the first time, leadership gained a clear understanding of what was happening inside the fleet and could influence the situation in time.
The results followed quickly: repeat violations fell by nearly 30%, CSA scores stabilized, and the fleet, for the first time in several years, passed an FMCSA audit with no penalties.
Why Safety Is Part of a Company’s Economics, Not a Checklist
Over the past five years, insurance costs in U.S. commercial transportation have risen steadily. Industry reports show total coverage costs for fleets have increased by an average of 25–35%. This is driven not only by higher crash rates, but also by the way companies build a high-risk profile through repeat violations, inaccurate reporting, and irregular data monitoring. In this environment, even a technically sound fleet can be priced as “high risk.”
When Yulia began working with AD Freight Inc’s data, it became clear that the company’s financial burden was shaped not by major incidents, but by the steady accumulation of small deviations: untimely HOS corrections, irregular record updates, and episodic incidents that never made it into a consolidated analysis. Together, these elements formed the statistics used to assess a fleet’s risk level over an annual cycle.
After the processes were rebuilt and violations fell, the risk profile began to look different. In the annual assessment used to calculate fleet insurance costs, AD Freight Inc, for the first time in a long period, moved into a safer category. That automatically reduced insurance expenses: total savings amounted to roughly 15–20% (2022–2025).
AD Freight Inc: Work That Helps Set Industry Standards
Today, at AD Freight Inc, Yulia draws on more than a decade in the U.S. transportation sector and tackles issues that directly shape fleet resilience: data quality, process predictability, and reporting accuracy. In the United States, where commercial transportation is a core pillar of the economy and over 2.2 million professional drivers work in long-haul and freight operations (2024 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data), these changes carry practical weight. For companies, this means clear risk indicators, no penalties, and the ability to budget without sudden surprises. For the commercial freight market, it is an example of how systematic data control and regular analytics help maintain resilient supply chains that millions of drivers and thousands of shippers across the country rely on every day.
