For many fleets, safety extends beyond the vehicle. Fleets who manage employees in the field—in industries like utilities, construction, and oil and gas—face an entirely different set of safety challenges once their employees reach the worksite. Field service workers operate in highly dynamic environments, often working with dangerous machinery in accident-prone settings.

Co-location—the amount of time that supervisors spend alongside their work crews in the field—is a leading indicator of worksite safety and productivity. Multiple studies, including research from the Campbell Institute and University of Tennessee, have shown that when an experienced supervisor spends time with employees in the field, accidents and injuries are less likely to occur. However, co-location is notoriously challenging to track and analyze at scale.

We’ve been working with Southern California Edison, one of the country’s largest utility companies, to implement a new field safety solution: the Samsara Co-Location Report. Available now for all Samsara customers, the Co-Location Report enables field service fleets to:

• See when, where, and how long supervisor vehicles are co-located with crew vehicles in the field.

• Create custom, flexible reports using tags for different regions or crews.

• Set and measure against goals based on supervisor co-location time, and easily pinpoint areas for improvement.

• Automatically send reports to team members via email, export data via CSV, or feed the data to your third-party software via our open API.

Keep reading to see how we built this new report and get a first look at how it works.

How the Co-Location Report works

Our new Co-Location Report makes it easy to get quick, accurate visibility into co-location—plus glean actionable insights on a supervisor or aggregate level. Here’s how it works.

1. Set up an automated report

With Samsara, you can create custom, flexible reports to analyze co-location across any subset of regions, districts, or crews. To create a new report, simply: 

• Specify a recurring schedule to run the report.

• Add recipients to automatically receive the report via email.

2. Customize your settings

Samsara calculates co-location based on real-time GPS data. When two or more vehicles are within a specified distance of each other for a specified amount of time, Samsara can identify that as a co-location event. When customizing your report settings, you can:

• Customize the minimum stop time and event radius required to record a co-location event.

• Create excluded locations with geofences to ensure report accuracy (for example, you could exclude your headquarters’ parking lot).

• Set a weekly hours goal for supervisors to benchmark against.

• Choose one or more driver tags for supervisors and one or more vehicle tags for crews in your Samsara dashboard to measure co-location between those groups.

3. Glean new insights from your data

Within minutes of creating a new report, it’s ready for you to use. The Co-Location Report will surface the following:

• A summary of co-location events and time for the specified date range.

• A time breakdown so you can see how much time was spent in transit, on site, co-located, and at excluded locations.

• Daily co-location event summaries, with actual time spent co-located compared to your specified goal.

With the Co-Location Report, you can more easily measure this critical leading indicator, uncover new insights, and achieve your field safety goals.

Try it out for yourself today

Our new Co-Location Report is available now for all Samsara customers. If your fleet manages employees in the field—whether you’re in utilities, construction, oil and gas, or any other field service industry—this report can help you achieve your field safety goals.

• If you’re already a Samsara customer, you can access the Co-Location Report today in your Samsara dashboard. Click on “Reports,” then “Co-Location Report” to get started.

• If you’re not a Samsara customer yet and you’re interested in learning more about our solutions, get in touch with our team today. We can show you a demo of our fleet management platform and explore how our Co-Location Report can help you increase field safety.