For our latest entry of In the Driver’s Seat, we’re pleased to introduce you to Tom Cooper, Managing Director at SafetyCulture, a powerful operations platform that helps businesses improve safety, quality, and efficiency across their teams.
Designed mainly for the construction and manufacturing industries, SafetyCulture provides easy-to-use tools for inspections, audits, incident reporting, and team communication. The platform enables organisations to identify risks early, maintain compliance, and foster — as its name suggests — a proactive safety culture.
What is your dream vehicle and why?
A Toyota LandCruiser 300 Series. I have no practical use for it in Sydney (yet), but when my son grows up a little, I want to go on some wild adventures with him and our friends out back.
What is something you’re working on right now at the company?
We are working on ingesting telematics data into SafetyCulture so that customers have a one-stop shop that incorporates safety data, telematics data and maintenance data — giving you a view of your fleet.
We are currently working on bringing in a wide range of telematics data into SafetyCulture, so that customers have a one-stop shop to view all of their asset-related data in one place. We can’t do that work by ourselves, so we work with great players and partners in the industry — like Tim and the team at Fleetyr — to bring that data in.
We know that data is highly fragmented in the asset space, so we are trying to make it simpler for folks, hopefully reducing admin and costs, but really — improving operational performance. We believe in getting the right information to the right people at the right time to make the best decisions. If we do that well, we’ll make our customers’ lives a hell of a lot easier. We’re already seeing great results, and we’ve only scratched the surface.
What is something you’re most proud of at work?
Building the SafetyCulture Connect business.
We have been a data collection business for years in the Safety space, but we found that people were collecting a lot of data around assets. We said, let’s see if we can make a business out of that, and change the way customers work. We are still in our early days, but already seeing good success… but time will tell!
What is the hardest part about what you do?
Deciding what to prioritise can be extremely challenging. The opportunity to make a difference in asset management is huge, and there are lots of people trying to solve the problems that our customers face every day.
Listening to customers is the best part of the job, but the hardest part is to distil it down and deploy in a way that adds incremental value, every week. Sometimes that decision is easy, but most of the time it’s hard.
Managers in the safety and mobility space have a tough job too. What is your company doing to help make it easier for them?
I reckon it’s the hardest job in the world! There are a number of things that we can do to make it easier, but based on what our customers tell us and what we see, the mobility space is difficult because our customers are running so many different things to try manage their assets — paper, excel, telematics software, maintenance software, safety software… the list goes on.
We want to bring it all into one platform that connects the frontline users with their data and their assets. The simpler that process can be, the better the outcome. At the end of the day, the goal is to make sure that our customers can get their equipment out and running for as long as possible and generate a return. If we can do that, our customers win.
Who is the most interesting person you’ve met in the mobility industry and why?
A guy called Jez down in South Australia; he’s quite a character. Easygoing guy, works hard running a small hire business that he started.
The first time I met him, he was talking about how he doesn’t know how to turn on his laptop, but it became clear very quickly that he was exceptionally switched on. He doesn’t bother with the laptop because he runs his business from the cab of an excavator!
He needed his data in real-time, and he needed it on his mobile. It wasn’t a heap of data he needed, but we needed to adapt our approach for the realities of working mobile for people like Jez.
What do you think is the biggest challenge currently facing the mobility industry?
A huge challenge is still in fragmented data combined with complex reporting requirements, and that’s across finance, maintenance, quality and safety.
The reporting requirements are onerous, and the fragmented data makes it even harder. So the question we ask ourselves every time we are building a new feature — will this actually make it easier for the customer?
What do you think is still missing or poorly understood in the mobility industry?
I think the power of the data that we are sitting on today is still something many struggle with.
We’ve collectively been great at figuring out how to gather data over the last 10-15 years, but with the onset of the AI age, I think our ability to drive game-changing insight and impact will now be accessible to everyone.
We are laser-focused on figuring out how to deliver this to customers in a way that is easy to use, and give them a platform with enough data to be able to generate the right insights.
What do you think the mobility industry will look like 10 years from now?
I never stop being amazed at the technology that keeps coming out every week — it’s just amazing.
I think the increasing requirements that data be accessible in real-time in the field will continue to grow. As data becomes easier to capture directly from OEMs, I’m hopeful that this will become easier to deliver for customers. And as data gets easier to capture, I think AI will then make it easier to get the right information, to the right people, at the right time.
So it feels like everything is coming together at the right time to drive the next leg of innovation for the industry. Throw in autonomous vehicles, and who knows what it’ll be like in 2035!
Keen to learn more about SafetyCulture or Tom Cooper? Reach out to him directly on LinkedIn or visit the SafetyCulture website.
If you think you have what it takes to be interviewed for our next In the Driver’s Seat or if you have suggestions on who we should talk to, get in touch with us.
