Journey Management for Field Teams in India: A Practical Guide

Road travel is the most dangerous thing many office-based companies ask their people to do. India recorded 4,80,583 road accidents and 1,72,890 deaths in 2023, the highest number of deaths on record, according to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways’ Road Accidents in India 2023 report. 83.4% of the people killed were of working age (18 to 60), and about two in three deaths happened in rural areas, where field visits often go.

Journey management is the discipline of keeping those people safe. It started in oil and gas, where crews drive long distances to remote sites, but the ideas fit any company whose auditors, engineers or sales staff spend their days on the road.

The idea in one line

Before the trip, plan it. During the trip, know where people are. After the trip, confirm they are back. If anything is missed, a named person acts.

Before: the journey plan

A journey plan answers six questions. For a routine visit it should take less than a minute; for a long or night drive, a few minutes more.

1. Who is travelling, and with whom?
2. Where to, and by which route?
3. When do they leave, and when will they be back?
4. How: own vehicle, company car, cab (with the vehicle number and driver’s name), bus or train?
5. What could go wrong: night driving, a long highway stretch, a remote site, monsoon roads, a site they have never visited?
6. Who follows up if they are late?

Then one decision: is this trip high-risk? High-risk trips get shorter check-in gaps, a faster escalation and, sometimes, a second person.

Questions worth asking before a long drive

• Can the trip avoid the hours of darkness? Visibility is lower, roads are emptier and tiredness sets in.
• Is the driver rested? Fatigue is easy to ignore and very hard to detect.
• Are there planned breaks every two hours on long drives?
• Is there mobile coverage on the route? If not, what is the fallback?
• Does the employee have the site contact’s number, and does the site know they are coming?

During: knowing where people are

This is where most companies either do nothing or do too much.

Doing nothing means “call me when you reach”. It works until the day nobody remembers to call, which is the day something went wrong.

Doing too much means tracking employees all day. It upsets people, they start leaving their phones behind, and under India’s DPDP Act it is hard to justify.

The middle path:

• Location only during the trip. Sharing starts when the employee starts the trip and stops when they end it.
• Automatic arrival. When the employee reaches the site, they are checked in without having to remember. When they leave, they are checked out.
• A back-by time. If they are not back on time and do not answer, the escalation starts by itself.
• An SOS that works without unlocking the phone and without mobile data, because highways and remote sites are exactly where data drops.

After: closing the journey

The trip ends when the employee says they are back. Their manager or the Safety Desk can be told automatically (“back safe”), and the trip goes into a travel history with the times, sites visited and what happened.

Review the history every month. Which routes produce most overdue alerts? Which sites always run late? Who never ends their trips? This is where the process gets better.

When a check-in is missed

Write down your escalation before you need it: who is alerted first, who is next, after how many minutes, and when it stops. Our escalation matrix template gives you a copy-ready version.

Journey plan checklist

• Every work trip has a destination and a back-by time.
• Cab trips record the vehicle number and driver.
• High-risk trips (night, remote, long drives, first visits) are marked and get tighter checks.
• Location is shared only during the trip, and staff are told the rule.
• Arrival and departure at regular sites are recorded automatically.
• A missed back-by time escalates to named people, with times.
• Employees have an SOS that works hands-free and offline.
• The travel history is reviewed monthly.

How ORBII Teams handles journey management

ORBII Teams puts the plan, the tracking and the follow-up in one app and one web console.

• The plan: an employee starts a trip in the ORBII app with a destination and a back-by time, and marks it high-risk if needed. Adding a cab’s vehicle number and driver comes in the next app update.
• During the trip: HR adds the company’s regular sites (offices, plants, client locations) once, with a check-in radius. ORBII checks people in when they arrive and out when they leave, only during a trip. It ignores blurry GPS fixes and people driving past, so a car on the highway next to a plant does not count as an arrival.
• Safe arrival: the manager, the Safety Desk or both can be told when someone arrives and when they are back safe.
• If they are late: ORBII walks the escalation ladder you set, up to five levels, and stops when someone takes ownership.
• Safe routes: before a drive of up to about 250 km, the app can compare routes by how many open places, police stations and petrol pumps lie along them at the hour of travel.
• SOS: by button, by saying “help”, “bachao” or “madad”, or with a silent shake. Without data, it goes out by text message.
• Afterwards: the console keeps a travel history. For the last seven days, the account owner and Safety Desk can open a trip’s route, and every look is recorded.

Location is shared only during a trip the employee started, or during an SOS. Read more on our lone worker safety page or our employee safety app page.