Food & Beverage, Site Visibility

Highlights

• Centralized platform allows Brothers Food Services to view all of their camera streams in a single dashboard, enabling greater safety and efficiency insights.

• Remote visibility and mobile access provides BFS the ability to remotely troubleshoot issues or check in on sites from anywhere. 

• Intelligent search tools make it easy to investigate and resolve incidents, allowing BFS to more proactively coach employees.

• Customizable video permissions enable more BFS leaders to directly access relevant video footage to improve onsite workflows and reduce administrative bottlenecks.

“The Samsara system is already paying for itself by helping prevent an accident each month."

Challenge

Brothers Food Services (BFS) is one of the largest produce distributors in Texas, transporting a wide range of produce, dairy, and specialty and processed items. They offer full-service cold storage across their four main distribution centers spanning over 500,000 square feet of warehousing space. Across their operations, employee safety is critical. “I need to be able to quickly investigate when an incident occurs,” said Arley Garner, Director of IT. “With our old camera systems, it could take hours to find the right video footage and share it. This process was time-intensive and caused us to be reactive.” BFS needed an easy-to-use system that allowed them to streamline incident investigation and save labor hours.

Solution

Today, BFS has deployed Site Visibility across their warehouses to monitor their docks, racks and coolers, and parking lots. They are also rolling out Dash Cams, Vehicle Gateways, and Environmental Monitors across their fleet to further connect their operations. 

A key reason BFS decided to partner with Samsara was the ability to consolidate camera streams from across sites. Site Visibility allows the BFS leadership team to compare dock processes at different locations, ensure proper protocols are followed, and identify best practices. Garner is also seeing other efficiency gains by being able to remotely view video footage. “We had a technical issue occur in one of our server rooms. Even though I was at a different site," said Garner. "I pulled up the camera stream and helped coach the onsite tech on how to fix the issue. It saved me hours of downtime and travel time.”

With Site Visibility, BFS further improves efficiency by investigating onsite incidents in minutes, rather than hours, helping Garner more quickly resolve issues, such as damages at the loading docks. “With Site Visibility, I can search and review past footage to see who caused the damage, how it happened, and understand what we need to do to improve their workflows,” said Garner. “Previously, someone would have had to be physically present during an incident to not only catch it, but also train on it. Site Visibility allows us to be much more proactive.” 

BFS also needed the ability to not only give video access to more stakeholders in their organization, but also segment and define who has access to which streams. While their leadership team needs to be able to access all the cameras, some users only need access to dash cams and some only need to view a select group of onsite cameras. “It’s really easy to set up tags and permissions in the dashboard, and this was really important to us,” says Garner. 

Results

BFS is already experiencing major gains since implementing Site Visibility. They use intelligent search features and clothing detection to quickly investigate onsite incidents and ensure employees are wearing the required orange or yellow high-visibility vests. When an incident or coachable moment is detected, they save a video clip to their Cloud Coaching Library to use in safety trainings. This video-based coaching allows BFS to more proactively coach their employees and to identify unsafe behavior and correct it before it becomes an issue. In fact, BFS is already seeing a decrease in monthly accidents. “The Samsara system is already paying for itself by helping prevent an accident each month,” said Garner.