A critical need for automated temperature monitoring and alerting to save thousands in product costs.

Aegion is a multinational provider of pipeline services that include the protection, rehabilitation, engineering, and design of infrastructure projects for a wide range of sectors, such as oil and gas, industrial, mining, as well as structural and municipal projects. 

Founded in 1971, the company has grown and thrived for more than 50 years. However, in 2022, Aegion faced one of the biggest threats in the company's history. "One of our main lines of business is manufacturing and installing liners that fit into existing pipes," said Guy Gordon, the company's Director of Asset Management. "The liners need to be kept at a certain temperature, and if a shipment goes above that, the liner turns into a big rock and you need to cut it out of the truck with a chainsaw. The product is ruined, and each incident can cost anywhere from $35,000 to $500,000."

For years, Aegion used an in-house call center staffed by a team that would manually monitor and manage reefer temperatures. In 2022, the company decided to shut down the call center and automate a reefer monitoring and alerting system. "It was critical to find a solution that worked from day one," Gordon said. "If we didn't, the cost to the company would be in the tens of millions of dollars. It could have shut down our business."

Turning ideas into solutions on a tight timeline with the Samsara team.

The Aegion team had ideas about how to automate monitoring for their reefer fleet, but they turned to Samsara’s Solutions Integration Services (SIS) team to help build out a temperature alerting solution integrating their various tools and systems. "We didn't know exactly what had to be done, but our ideas got fleshed out once we started talking to Samsara," said Jack Eller, Logistics Coordinator at Aegion. "Samsara took everything we put down as a requirement, they figured out how the system would flow, and they made it work."

The deployment also had to happen quickly—and without any issues. "We had our initial talks with Samsara in August, and we had the system up and running by the end of October," Eller said. "We also had to do a hard cut over from the old manual system, and after a week of testing, we switched over without a hitch. It felt pretty impossible when it started, but we got it done. I can't say enough good things about the Samsara team."

Automated reefer monitoring leads to $500K+ savings on staffing, and prevents $6M in product losses.

With Samsara's modern cloud technology based on AWS, Aegion has been able to eliminate manual temperature monitoring for their reefer fleet, driving significant cost savings. "Disbanding the call center and switching to automated monitoring helped us save $500,000 to $600,000 a year," Gordon said. Not only that, but by building a temperature monitoring alert system with Samsara’s SIS team, the company is avoiding over $6 million in annual costs due to high temperature events.

Moreover, Samsara has helped free up over 500 hours of manpower each year that can be used to improve other areas of Aegion's operations. "With the old system, on a busy day I would get a high temperature alert every 90 seconds during an eight-hour shift," Eller said. "Now the alerting system streamlines alerts to managers in the field. It's a huge improvement."

In addition to these tangible benefits, Gordon also points out that implementing Samsara has led to a cultural shift at Aegion. "Moving from manual intervention to an automated process is one of the biggest wins," said Gordon. "Now, we constantly talk about other aspects of our operations that could be more efficient with technology so we can use human capital for other parts of the organization. The appetite is definitely there to do more."