Davidsons Homes runs 30 telehandlers across active building sites in the Midlands. Eighteen months ago, getting footage off one of them meant driving to it.

The problem was retrieval

An incident on a muddy site miles away did not produce a clip. It produced a journey. Someone drove out, climbed into the cab, pulled the hard drive, and found out afterwards whether the data had survived.

“For over a decade, our business relied on a solution that served us well but, over time, became increasingly unreliable,” explains Ross Bayliss, Health, Safety & Environmental Director at Davidsons Homes. “We were facing corrupted hard drives, inoperable cameras, and significant downtime.”

Underneath that sat connectivity. Building sites have poor mobile coverage, single-network SIMs lose signal there, and evidence that cannot upload is evidence you do not have.

What was fitted

Davidsons Homes worked with SmartFits, who specified for the site rather than for the brochure: Geotab telematics with the MANTIS 5-channel camera system, feeding RECON.

**RECON** replaced the drive-out. Managers log in, view live and request footage.

**Five channels per telehandler**, front, driver-facing and two rear, with an in-cab monitor for tight spaces.

**Multi-network roaming SIMs**, switching to whichever network is strongest on that site. This is the part that made the rest work.

**A panic button**, so a driver can flag something immediately.

What changed

**Footage that is actually there.** “Since installation, the results have spoken for themselves,” says Ross. “On every occasion we’ve needed to access camera footage, it has been available 100% of the time, without a single issue.”

**Drivers cleared.** On construction sites, proving what did not happen matters as much as showing what did. Davidsons has already used RECON footage to establish that its drivers were not at fault, which protects the claim and the operator’s reputation at the same time.

**A shift from investigation to prevention.** The system started as something consulted after an incident. It is now used the other way round, turning near misses into safety briefings.

Next

With the fleet equipped, the focus moves to engine idling: monitoring it through the platform to cut emissions and fuel.

The wider point is that the toughest environment is exactly where the cheap system fails, and where the difference shows up.