City of Kelowna

Improving lone-worker safety, compliance, routing, and field service visibility

City of Kelowna operates a fleet of 11 SUVs, pickups, and vans supporting water quality, laboratory testing, and meter-reading activities across Kelowna, British Columbia. Because technicians regularly work alone and can move from urban areas to isolated locations within minutes, the City needed a more reliable way to monitor employee safety and meet working-alone requirements. By replacing manual check-ins with automated safety monitoring and integrating employee status with fleet tracking, the City improved visibility into field operations, simplified compliance processes, and gained better information for routing and resource management.

The Challenge: Keeping Employees Safe in the Field

City of Kelowna technicians have highly variable schedules. Water quality technicians and meter readers may travel between densely populated urban areas and rural locations throughout the same day, sometimes working alone in environments where immediate assistance may not be available.

For years, the department relied on paper sign-in and sign-out sheets at the administration desk along with CB radios. Employees were expected to check in and out at set times, creating a manual process that could be cumbersome and difficult to manage consistently.

The City also needed to meet provincial and federal health and safety requirements for employees working alone. When technicians entered higher-risk areas, additional check-ins and risk assessments were required, creating a need for a system that could provide timely safety information without adding unnecessary administrative work.

The Solution: Automated Safety Monitoring and Fleet Visibility

The City introduced an app-based lone-worker safety system on technicians’ existing smartphones, eliminating the need for additional equipment or extensive training. The system automated employee status updates and check-ins while providing managers with alerts, safety audit logs, high-risk check-ins, GPS monitoring reports, and emergency assistance features.

Technicians are typically required to check in approximately every two hours, with more frequent check-ins in higher-risk environments. The automated approach allowed risk assessments to be completed in the field and helped managers respond more quickly when assistance was needed.

The system also replaced manual check-ins when employees entered high-hazard areas with shorter check-in requirements. Staff reported that the digital process was convenient and easy to use, while the department no longer needed to maintain paper sign-in sheets. Employees used the emergency help function several times, providing an additional safety resource for workers in the field.

The City then connected its employee safety information with fleet tracking technology. This gave managers a shared view of vehicles, employee safety status, and field activity. Vehicle location and route data could also be used to review routes for training purposes, improve dispatching, and identify opportunities to use resources more efficiently.

The Results: Better Safety Compliance and More Efficient Field Operations

The transition from manual monitoring to automated safety management produced several documented improvements for the City of Kelowna.

The new system eliminated paper-based sign-in sheets and manual high-risk check-ins, reducing the administrative burden associated with monitoring employees who work alone. The City also reported that the system met its working-alone policy requirements and supported compliance with applicable provincial and federal health and safety guidelines.

For field employees, automated check-ins and emergency assistance features provided an additional layer of protection. The system’s help function was used several times, while after-hours monitoring helped managers keep track of technicians as they approached the end of their shifts.

Fleet tracking added another layer of operational visibility. Managers could review vehicle routes to help train new employees, improve routing, and make more efficient use of available resources. The City also planned to use driver behaviour and idling information to support safer driving and its efforts to reduce vehicle emissions.

For a municipal team operating across both urban and isolated environments, combining employee safety monitoring with GPS tracking gave the City of Kelowna a more connected approach to managing field work. Instead of relying on separate manual processes, managers gained greater visibility into employee safety, vehicle locations, routing, and day-to-day field operations.

Want to see more fleet success stories? Explore our Success Stories to see how GPS tracking and telematics are helping organizations improve safety, efficiency, maintenance, and fleet performance.