How Aunt Millie's Improves Safety and Efficiency with Site Visibility
Learn how a national bakery business uses AI-Powered Video to improve workplace safety, security, and efficiency.
Meet Aunt Millie's
A reactive approach to worker safety due to low video visibility and limited access
Aunt Millie’s is a century-old bakery business that produces and delivers more than half a million pounds of bread daily through 5 bakeries, 55 distribution centers, and a fleet of 600+ delivery vehicles. Given the scale of their business, it’s critical for Aunt Millie’s to keep a close eye on their operations to ensure proper safety protocols and protect their employees from serious injuries.
Aunt Millie’s had a legacy security camera solution in place, but few users in the organization could access the footage, since they had to pay a costly license fee per user. For those that did have access, video retrieval was difficult, taking administrators hours to manually find and review footage. When a safety incident occurred, it was time-consuming and inefficient to find the relevant footage; in some cases, the footage was never reviewed altogether.
On top of these challenges, after Aunt Millie’s encountered issues involving catalytic converter theft, they realized that something needed to change. Aunt Millie’s needed a solution that would improve visibility and enable them to take a proactive approach to their operations—ensuring worker safety and security and increasing back-office efficiency.
Site Visibility proactively reduces worker incidents and streamlines video retrieval
Aunt Millie’s experienced a massive improvement in safety and efficiency since adopting Samsara Site Visibility. With Site Visibility installed across their locations—many of which contain industrial machinery—Aunt Millie’s now has a complete field of vision into their operations. Now, the back-office team can spot potentially hazardous situations and proactively address safety risks before an incident occurs—improving workplace safety and efficiency.
“In the bakeries, we have big and heavy equipment being worked on by humans. There’s a high possibility for amputation, electrocution, and other serious injuries that can have a big impact on our employees if they don't follow the rules,” said Beth Woodbury, VP of Safety. “Managers can't be everywhere all the time, so having [Samsara] in place helps us better mitigate serious injuries, identify issues before somebody gets hurt, and coach them on safer practices.”
On top of preventing incidents, another important component of Aunt Millie’s safety program is being able to review footage for when incidents do happen. Instead of spending hours manually reviewing videos, supervisors can now use AI search features to quickly identify and retrieve key footage in minutes, transforming how Aunt Millie’s investigates incidents. For example, after a recent catalytic converter theft, they used Samsara footage to quickly and easily identify the culprits involved.
“We use the AI technology to search videos for motion and people. We can skip to specific timeframes to quickly see what happened, saving us time and money since somebody doesn’t need to sit and watch hours of video,” said Woodbury. “We had a catalytic converter stolen off some trucks recently. Now, we can look through the camera footage to identify who stole them.”
Across so many sites, Aunt Millie’s captures a large volume of footage—but Samsara has enabled their team to handle this data at scale. Granular user permissions allow Aunt Millie’s to easily grant unique roles to relevant team members. More than 50 supervisors and managers now have access to Samsara, giving more stakeholders the ability to review key footage and providing more opportunities for coaching and collaboration—improving employee performance and boosting workplace safety.
“It was easy to set up user permissions for our team. We wanted to give them the accessibility to view everything they needed to view so they can do their jobs. Everything is on one platform so they don’t have to toggle between different tools,” said Woodbury. “Now, our team can coach our employees on how to be safer.”
Improved video visibility protects employees and reduces injury claims
With Samsara Site Visibility, Aunt Millie's has improved workplace safety, security, and efficiency. Intelligent Search has reduced the time it takes to find key incident footage from hours to just a few minutes. Centralized video management has increased visibility into workplace safety, helping prevent serious injuries before they happen and saving the company a potential $1 million+ in injury claims.
Because baking and distributing bread is such a physically demanding job, it was important for Aunt Millie’s to invest in the safety of their employees. With Samsara, they have transformed the safety of their workplaces—and they're just getting started. “Samsara is so easy to use. It only takes us a few clicks to find what we need,” says Woodbury. “Now we have the visibility to possibly avoid a serious injury—or even save someone’s life.”
