Prior to engaging with Samsara, Garcia and his team had no advanced warning of lift station issues until they made the journey on-site. This lack of forewarning led to significant equipment damage and high repair costs. For instance, a dry well filled with raw water corroded equipment, costing over $70,000 in repairs. The absence of alarms and notifications meant that issues were only discovered during on-site visits, making it difficult to prevent incidents like flooding. This reactive approach was inefficient and costly, prompting the need for a more proactive solution.

After a few accidents served as a wake-up call that their current safety program wasn’t working, Markstein knew they needed to do something more to improve their fleet safety. Director of Operations Tom Roberts began looking for a dash cam solution that would help him save money, exonerate his drivers from accidents, and coach drivers on defensive driving tactics. Getting driver buy-in on dash cams from day one was a significant challenge. Roberts found a way to get his drivers excited about dash cams by selecting his top driver to pilot the system and provide initial feedback. This approach helped in getting the drivers to be advocates of the system.

Central Texas Water Supply faced frequent connectivity issues with their legacy SCADA system, which was critical for monitoring and controlling their water supply operations. The system's reliance on two-way radios led to delays in receiving updates, especially during bad weather, causing significant communication gaps. Additionally, the SCADA provider was closing its doors, necessitating a switch to a more reliable and efficient solution. The organization needed a system that could provide real-time monitoring, prevent service interruptions, and improve operator efficiency.

KeHE Distributors faced challenges with their previous AOBRD and GPS tracking provider, which had hardware that was difficult to install and use. The hardware was not portable, leading to a loss of GPS tracking on 15% of their fleet, making it difficult to accurately track deliveries and update customers with ETAs. Additionally, drivers struggled with the in-cab tablets provided by the previous system, which could not load additional apps, resulting in a lack of a consolidated place to track routes and hours. This led to inefficiencies and a cluttered electronic setup in the trucks.

With over 20,000 students to transport every day, Birmingham City Schools (BCS) faced significant challenges in managing their large fleet of 158 school buses and 135-vehicle white fleet. The primary issues included improving on-time performance, reducing unsafe driving behavior, and optimizing vehicle maintenance. The previous telematics provider took over 5 months to install devices on new buses, leaving the fleet without real-time data and insights. Additionally, the vehicle-based safety score system was inadequate for tracking individual driver performance, leading to inaccurate assessments and difficulties in driver accountability. Foster, the Director of Transportation, needed a more efficient and reliable telematics solution to address these challenges and improve overall fleet safety and efficiency.

KS Industries (KSI) operates across six major energy-producing states in the United States, managing over 1,200 vehicles and 1,000 drivers. The company needed to enhance safety and visibility for its crews working in remote and hazardous oil fields. The previous system had limitations, including a 100-vehicle cap on live map visibility and connectivity issues in the field. These challenges made it difficult to monitor real-time GPS locations, track crews for rescues, and ensure safety compliance. Additionally, the lack of connectivity hindered productivity, causing delays in processing critical paperwork like Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) and safety audits.

Deschutes Brewery faced a potential $750,000 investment in a redundant chiller to ensure the reliability of their brewing process. To avoid this significant capital expenditure, they needed a way to assess the health of their existing chiller and make informed decisions about its maintenance and operation. The challenge was to find a solution that could provide real-time insights into the chiller's condition and help optimize its usage to extend its lifespan.

When a single hour of downtime at Meridian Brick costs thousands of dollars in lost revenue, having the most accurate downtime data is critical for the company’s bottom line. David Peters, Meridian Brick’s Director of Technical Services, is on a mission to improve operational efficiency, and knows that accurate production data is the first step in knowing what to improve. The most challenging part of their manual data logging process was never having accurate times. All of the 30-second downtimes that went unlogged ended up becoming death by a thousand papercuts. With Samsara, the impact of real-time analytics on uptime, throughput, and scrap rate that can be accessed from any device has been immediate. The data is way more accurate than what was possible with a manual system. They noticed, for example, that a significant amount of downtime was occurring at a particular plant due to raw material loading, something which wasn’t apparent in their manual data before. Accurate downtime logging has empowered David and the plant managers to make more informed decisions around processes, resourcing, and capital expenditures in order to improve production performance.

Pine Environmental's clients needed a more efficient way to monitor and report on various environmental factors such as air, gas, water, and soil quality. Previously, clients had to manually collect data from monitoring equipment spread across large job sites, which was time-consuming and inefficient. Pine sought a telemetry solution that could provide centralized visibility into real-time and historical sensor data. They required a system that was always on, scalable, easy to use, and supported multiple industrial protocols. Additionally, the solution needed to offer secure communications, mobile visibility, and low-powered hardware with data backup capabilities. After unsatisfactory experiences with previous telemetry providers, Pine laid out a no-compromise set of required capabilities for their new system.

KWRL Transportation Cooperative, the largest school bus fleet in Washington state, faced significant challenges in managing its 100 buses and ensuring the safety and efficiency of its operations. The existing repeater-based GPS system was inadequate, providing updates every 10 minutes, which was insufficient for real-time monitoring. This lack of real-time visibility made it difficult for the team to keep buses on route and on time, leading to inefficiencies and potential safety risks. Additionally, the cooperative needed a solution that could handle the growing number of students and routes, as one of the districts was projected to grow from 2,000 to 8,000 students by 2025. The team also required accurate historical data to build smarter routes and plan for fleet expansion, as well as real-time alerts for engine fault codes to ensure timely maintenance and reduce downtime.

Cheese is a comparatively difficult product to produce, store, and ship. Each variety requires different aging times, temperature, and humidity. The same goes for shipping, and it is imperative that cheese is protected from high temperatures and humidity due the effect on delicate flavors and the potential for bacterial growth. The Cowgirl Creamery team was using analog temperature and manually recording temperatures on clipboards three times a day in their delivery trucks and twice daily in their aging rooms, cold storage rooms, and milk tanks. Cunnie knew there had to be a better way to record all this data, and she began looking at chart recorders to record temperature and alert the team when temps fell out of spec. Coincidentally, Cunnie was also searching for a fleet management solution to improve the operations of their distribution network. She hoped to find a solution that combined temperature monitoring with fleet management. That’s when she found Samsara.

Hartmann and his team sought a way to track the temperature and location of their refrigerated shipments to ensure quality upon delivery to their 1,800 accounts between New England and Philadelphia. Acme’s ongoing commitment to product safety, along with their esteemed BRC Certification, made documenting temperature throughout the cold chain critical. Specifically, Hartmann was looking for a solution with accurate temperature monitoring and real-time alerting that was easy to use. The Acme team was using thousands of basic data loggers which were quickly lost or damaged during operation. When the data loggers failed, the corresponding deliveries were rejected. “This is a big hassle and very expensive,” comments Hartmann. For Acme, this equates to tens of thousands of dollars lost annually due to waste, extra shipments, and labor.

Francisco, in his new role at Fames Transport, aimed to modernize the family business to keep up with changing technology and business tools. His first initiative was to update the company's GPS tracking solution, which was clunky and used excessive data. Francisco tasked his team with finding a new provider as soon as their contract finished. Upon discovering Samsara’s platform, he was impressed by its intuitive interface and accurate live location tracking. However, the decision to adopt Samsara was ultimately driven by the platform's comprehensive features, including safety improvements from in-vehicle cameras and operational savings from automating time sheets.