Manual tracking and a 72-hour footage limit created blind spots

Whissell Contracting has spent more than fifty years building the underground utilities, earthworks, and heavy haul infrastructure that supports Alberta's growth. Running operations across Calgary, Lethbridge, and Leduc means contending with Alberta's Chinook winds—warm, dry gusts of air that blow down from the Rocky Mountains—and dense clay ground that turns an active job site into a mud pit within hours.

Before Samsara, Whissell relied on its previous provider for telematics, along with forward-facing cameras that recorded to a physical SD card. The card held only 72 hours of footage before it began recording over itself. "There was only so much storage on that," said Nathan Power, General Manager of Equipment at Whissell Contracting. "If we weren't quick enough, we had the potential of losing the data that we required."

Tracking smaller, unpowered equipment, generators, water pumps, carb saws, and specialized tooling was an entirely manual process built on spreadsheets and verbal reports from site foremen. When a tool went missing, crews launched a phone tree followed by a manual site search that regularly ate one to two hours per site. Across the 10 to 12 active jobs Whissell runs at once, that added up to as much as 24 hours of lost crew time per manual search, meaning the resulting downtime often cost more than the missing tool itself.

Whissell also recognized they were wasting thousands of dollars in fuel on unnecessary idling, but they had no objective way to separate necessary idling, like running a heater or air conditioner through Alberta's extreme weather, from unnecessary fuel waste.