North America

“Samsara is one of the most professional and innovative companies that we have had the opportunity to partner with. In a short period of time, the team at Samsara was able to take our ideas and bring them to life."

Kim M. Da Silva, Vice President of Operations at Pine Environmental

Meet Pine Environmental

Pine Environmental provides rentals, sales, and repairs for a wide range of environmental monitoring products to customers in all industries. Pine prides themselves on going above and beyond for their customers, whether that’s through factory certified repairs, readily available support, or by providing new innovative data services. Pine chose to partner with Samsara to transform their business model with value added remote monitoring and control services.

Partnering with Samsara

Pine’s clients use their equipment to monitor and report on nondestructive testing, continuous emissions, and the quality of air, gas, water, soil, sound, and more. It’s critical that Pine’s clients have access to the data generated by the environmental sensors so that they can maintain compliance levels and take action to keep their workers and the community safe.

Previously, Pine’s clients would have to walk around the job site, sometimes miles in length, to manually collect data from their monitoring equipment multiple times a day. To improve this experience, Pine sought to offer a telemetry solution that could provide clients with centralized visibility into real-time and historical sensor data. After less than desirable experiences with previous telemetry providers, Pine laid out a no-compromise set of required capabilities for their new system.

This included:

• An always on solution that scales easily with growing job sites and client needs

• Ease of creating and adjusting alerts, dashboards, and reports

• Support for multiple industrial protocols to connect to the many different makes and models of environmental sensors Pine offers

• Secure communications and remotely upgradeable firmware so that there is no data loss or downtime

• Mobile visibility for clients wherever they are, from any device

• Low powered hardware with data backup capabilities

Faced with a buy versus build decision, Pine ultimately chose Samsara for better speed to market, ease of use, and flexibility.

“The most important aspect for our clients is the reliable, defendable, and secure transmission of data from the equipment to the system. We’re confident that we can provide this through our partnership with Samsara.”

Anthony Borkowski, Remote Monitoring Specialist at Pine Environmental

Remote monitoring as a service

The data services Pine now provides their customers fundamentally enhances the value of their offering. The remote monitoring solution includes Samsara Industrial Controllers (IGs) for telemetry and cloud-based software. The IG provides universal connectivity via major industrial protocols, allowing Pine to offer this service along with thousands of their sensors and equipment. And using the intuitive software, Pine easily sets up dashboards, reports, and text, email, or call out alerts for clients to access through their own web browser and adjust and modify as needed.

With Samsara, Pine’s clients:

• Reduce the man hours needed to collect data

• Ensure compliance with local, state, and federal regulations

• Keep the community and workers safe in potentially hazardous environments

Reduce the man hours needed to collect data

With Samsara, real-time data is brought into the cloud so that any user can review the data at any time. For example, a Pine client may need to collect air quality readings every ten minutes to comply with state mandates. Instead of having a dozen employees walk around a large jobsite to collect readings every ten minutes, the client can use Samsara to run a report that consolidates all of the data collected that day. That report can be printed to PDF, downloaded to CSV, or ingested into another system via API.

“The system gives our clients flexibility to collect data from a wide range of equipment and flexibility in how they choose to receive that data; they can instantly print reports that are ready to submit to government agencies or they can customize dashboards for internal users,” Borkowski said.

Ensure compliance with regulations

Alerts are mission critical to Pine’s clients. If they are approaching a threshold, for example the maximum level of dust in the air, Samsara’s solution can alert them with a text message or phone call in real-time, so they can take action immediately. This eliminates the need to manually monitor equipment and helps clients ensure they are always in compliance with regulations.

Pine needed to ensure that alerts were easy to configure because each client has different local, state, and federal mandates to follow. Pine’s clients can configure alerts in the dashboard by assigning thresholds and adding contacts for email, text, or call outs all in a matter of minutes. Samsara also provides Pine’s clients with secure, reliable, and defendable data that would stand up if there ever were any legal issues with the regulations.

Keep people safe in hazardous environments

Not only do alerts keep Pine’s clients in compliance, but they also ensure a safe environment for the community and their employees. Real-time and reliable data is very important in instances where there are safety risks at the jobsite, for example if there are hazardous materials in the air. Samsara provides Pine’s clients with the peace of mind that they can access real-time, reliable data from any computer, tablet, or mobile phone so that they can take action to address the hazard immediately.

As Borkowski put it, “remote and real-time data and reporting are mission-critical for ensuring our client’s safety.”

Impact on Pine’s Business

In addition to helping Pine improve the value of their service offering, they have also gained efficiencies by partnering with Samsara. Their previous telemetry solutions had connectivity issues, gaps in data, and poor technical support that led to an overload of customer complaints and hours spent troubleshooting issues. With Samsara, Pine is able to diagnose the issue and provide quicker turnaround time on in-house repairs. The Samsara solution can be extended to the majority of Pine’s monitoring equipment, so Pine can offer it to new and old clients alike to establish new revenue streams. Plus, the open nature of the platform enables Pine to extend it as they identify new client use cases and grow. Pine's remote monitoring specialist, Borkowski, summed it up:

“Because of the way Samsara is oriented towards empowering the end user, our Telemetry Department now has a deeper understanding of how the IGs communicate with our equipment. We can easily solve a much wider range of problems over the phone with our clients.”