September product updates: 4 new Samsara releases to close gaps in your operation

This month, we’re sharing Samsara features designed to break down operational silos, unlock intelligent automations, and secure your workflows from the field to the back office. Our new releases optimize your routing plans, integrate your workshop and assets, secure your system credentials, and provide drivers access to an AI-powered assistant. Each one connects a place where information already exists to the place where someone can act on it.

1. Close the distance between spotting a problem and fixing it with three new Connected Maintenance updates

A maintenance workflow is a chain of handoffs. A defect turns up, becomes a work order, and is then handed off to a technician or a vendor. Break any link, and the vehicle or asset stays out of service.

This month, we’re announcing three new updates to Connected Maintenance that have strengthened three different links in that chain: what you can inspect, what you can measure, and what you can connect.

Inspect any asset, not just vehicles. DVIRs digitized vehicle inspections years ago. Everything else in the yard—forklifts, cranes, gensets, trailers—often still gets a walk-around with a clipboard or logged in a separate tool nobody else can see. And even when a defect does get written down, the repair lives in a different system, so the issue and the fix never meet. Now, asset inspections sit inside Connected Maintenance, next to DVIRs, fault codes, and preventive maintenance schedules, connecting the inspection and resolution of an asset in one dashboard.

Measure your shop without spreadsheets. Managers no longer need to manually copy and paste numbers to build reports to understand how their technicians are performing. Technician Performance answers those questions for you. Using Samsara Assistant or pre-configured Agent Studio templates, managers can ask natural language questions (such as, "What does my technicians' performance look like over the last 30 days?") and get utilization along with actual-versus-estimated variance in hours and cost for each technician. Technician Performance can be configured to run daily, weekly, or monthly with Agent Studio, so the same answer arrives without the need for a separate query.

Connect your shop to the systems you already run. A repair doesn't finish when the wrench goes down. The cost, labor hours, parts, and any warranty claim all still have to move into other systems. Today, that mostly means someone manually re-entering the same data over and over. 

In addition to our APIs for DVIR and work orders, this month we're expanding our open platform to provide new first-party endpoints for preventive maintenance schedules, parts, technician time cards, and warranties. That means repair costs, labor hours, and related data can sync automatically into your ERP or billing systems without the need for custom middleware.

2. Find out why your routes run late with new Route Planning capabilities

Do you know how many of your stops run late? If you run Samsara Telematics, the answer is already in your account. An analysis of more than 4,000 Samsara fleets found that approximately 75% of completed stops deviate by more than 10 minutes from the assumed route plan. Most fleets never see that gap, because the plan lives in one system and the vehicle data that could check it lives in another. This month, we're closing that gap with new Route Planning capabilities.

Service time recommendations turn that vehicle data into a fix. Utilizing Vehicle Gateway geofence records from your vehicle, Samsara compares actual stop times against the plan, continuously in the background. See every location you serve on a refreshed Plan vs. Actual page, with average planned time, average actual time, and the gap between them. Review the recommended service time and apply it to your locations and route templates so the next plan is built on it.

Together, these capabilities are designed to help fleets reduce late arrivals, identify opportunities to serve the same volume with fewer trucks or routes, and create a more balanced day across drivers. This was the case for SGC Foodservice, which transformed its routing with Samsara. "Reporting is one of our biggest gaps with our previous routing solution. We needed to track things, like how often customers stay on standard routes, how frequently off-day stops are added, or how consistently we're meeting expectations,” said David Fessenden, Director of Transportation. “Now, with Samsara Route Planning, we can proactively manage service levels and improve route performance."

3. Provide a frictionless login experience and proactively manage admin access with new Secure Access controls

As operations scale, managing admin permissions and field credentials becomes a critical security vector. Today, we are releasing role grant limits. Full Admins can now configure custom admin roles with strict role grant limits, locking down exactly which specific, lower-level roles they are authorized to assign or invite

Together, these give you faster logins and tighter control over who can grant access to what, without adding friction for your team.

4. Answer driver questions faster in the cab with Samsara Assistant — now available in the Driver App

Drivers are on the go all day, both on and off the road. A question about their hours, their route, or their Safety Score can come up anywhere. Yet the fastest path to an answer is often a call to an admin because a driver doesn't always have a free hand or a free minute to look for it. 

This month, we're bringing Samsara Assistant, the AI-powered assistant already available for admins in the Cloud Dashboard, directly into the Driver App. Drivers can type or use voice-to-text to ask a question and get an answer right where they're working, without navigating through menus or waiting on an admin. 

The assistant queries two datasets with this release:

• Samsara Knowledge answers how-to questions, such as how to edit a log or submit a form using Samsara's support documentation.

• Driver Insights answers questions about the driver's data, including remaining drive time, HoS violations, safety score changes, and route details such as the next stop and ETA. 

The result is fewer necessary app interactions, fewer calls to the office for questions the driver could answer themselves, and time back for both admins and drivers.

Ready to close the gaps in your operation?

These four releases don't just surface what's happening in your operation, they hand you a way to act on it, right where you're already looking. Existing customers can learn more about these new products by connecting with other users in our Community.

Otherwise, contact us to learn how Samsara’s latest innovations can help improve your operations.