August product updates: 5 new Samsara releases to help you turn insights into action

For most fleets, a shortage of data has never been a problem. Just the opposite: fleets have too much data, scattered across too many places, with too little time to act. Day to day, this means that fuel reports, safety alerts, maintenance queues and other important information are scattered across multiple solutions. The insights are there, but understanding and acting on them before costs start to rise is difficult.

Today, we're introducing five new ways Samsara helps you turn insights into action across fuel, safety, routing, maintenance and reporting. Each provides a clear view of what needs your attention and a fast way to act on it.

1. Find and fix invisible fuel leaks with the new Fuel Command Centre

Fuel accounts for as much as a fifth of a fleet's operating budget, yet fuel data has historically lived in siloed reports. Managers are left hunting for answers and reacting to budget overruns after the waste has already happened. Across Samsara's UK customers alone, we estimate more than £26 million in fuel spend is wasted in just six months.

The new Samsara Fuel Command Centre replaces scattered reports with a single dashboard that makes every pound of fuel spend visible and ranked, so operators and finance start from the same number. The solution allows you to:

• See your total recoverable fuel spend calculated automatically, with opportunities ranked by the pounds at stake.

• Drill into the biggest sources of waste – idling, off-network fuelling, potential fraud – without needing to export and manage a single report.

• Take one-click actions, such as turning on in-cab idling alerts, directly from the dashboard so you can take action to stop fuel waste immediately, directly from the report.

When paired with new Commercial Navigation capabilities (described below), you don’t just see fuel spend leaks; you can stop them before they happen. 

To learn more, Samsara customers can connect with peers and ask questions in the Fuel & Energy Community forum. 

2. Save money at the pump with Commercial Navigation enhancements

Samsara not only shows you where fuel spend leaks out of your budget with Fuel Command Centre, but now Commercial Navigation can close these gaps before those leaks happen.

Any fleet can be vulnerable to overspending on fuel. Even when you have a fuel policy in place, enforcing it on every trip is difficult. Drivers default to whatever pump is closest, and it isn't always the cheapest one on the route.

Samsara Commercial Navigation is the first navigation solution to bring fuel policy directly into routing. With pre-trip fuel optimisation, Commercial Navigation now plans the lowest-cost fuel stop into the driver's route before the truck leaves the yard, cutting out-of-route miles and unnecessary fuel spend. The recommendation weighs the planned route, fuel prices along the way – including the fleet's negotiated discounts and the vehicle's tank capacity – so the fuel stop is the most cost-effective option along the route.

In addition to fuel optimisation, Commercial Navigation now makes last-mile deliveries more efficient with precise approach paths. The solution understands your fleets and sites, so admins can use it to draw the exact path from the road to the correct service point. Any driver, even a new employee on their first day, can see exactly where to go without wasting time searching or calling dispatch.

With fuel-informed routing, fleets are poised to save a significant amount in fuel-related costs. Organisations are also saving time and improving efficiency. ECMD, a building-materials distributor operating across 26 U.S. states with 135 drivers, cut dispatch reroute calls from around 20 a week down to nearly zero. Another customer, NovaXpress, used last-mile guidance to specific gates, docks and yards – rather than generic mailing addresses – to drive a 33% uptick in on-time deliveries. This was a critical outcome for the company’s contracts with major shippers where delivery windows are tight.

3. Never let a critical incident go unresolved with Incident Centre

Many fleets can't see incidents as they happen and can't respond fast enough to mitigate the damage. Basic alert systems can also create alert fatigue, which means incidents often get caught too late. The cost of delayed incident reporting adds up quickly.

Now available globally, Incident Centre is an operational command centre that centralises incidents across safety, compliance, policy, security and maintenance. Here's what it can do:

• Automatically detect, prioritise and assign issues across your operations and allow you to view and manage them in one place.

• Align with your fleet’s specific operating hours, locations and policies, so what surfaces is what actually matters.

• Speed up investigations with the full context of each incident – map, video, telemetry, and driver and asset data – already assembled in one workspace.

• Auto-resolve incidents when the underlying issue is corrected, closing the loop without manual follow-up. For example, by assigning a form to a driver.

Another customer, Irving Materials, automated their entire daily-walk-arounds exception process. Now, when the system detects a missed pre-trip inspection, it triggers an in-cab audio alert to the driver and automatically resolves the incident once it's corrected without needing manual review. As Scott Roeger, fleet safety program manager, explained, "Before Incident Centre, I'd go through daily-walk-arounds exceptions every day and assign them to the plant manager, but by the time we reached the driver, they'd been out half the day. Now, incidents can be resolved the moment the driver corrects the issue. We've gone from reactive to proactive." 

4. See your whole operation in one place with custom dashboards.

Data is only powerful in context. A spike in safety events doesn't say much on its own, but placed side by side with your coaching programme data, it tells a powerful story. Previously, users often needed to export multiple datasets into Excel or outside business intelligence tools to find trends. This was a time-consuming process that wasted valuable operations and IT department resources. 

Now, custom dashboards give you an open canvas to combine up to 10 charts and tables in a single view. Here's what you can do:

• Combine data across domains – including safety, fuel, maintenance and driver performance – on one canvas.

• Apply advanced filters, like specific days of the week or custom timeframes, and drill down into any chart for the details behind the trend.

• Keep the view current with an auto-refresh interval of 15 minutes.

• Use pre-built templates to quickly create and share custom dashboards.

Operations, safety and business intelligence managers can easily display these dashboards – at their desks or on display screens in their command centres – to monitor fleet performance in near real time without any additional effort to find, export or manage data.

5. Fix what matters first with a priority-driven Asset Status page

Every morning, shop foremen want to answer one question: Which assets need my attention right now? Traditional maintenance pages give them a massive wall of numbers across hundreds of assets, forcing mechanics to cross-reference faults, defects and preventative maintenance schedules just to guess what's most urgent.

The redesigned Asset Status page in Samsara’s Connected Maintenance solution replaces that table with a single, priority-ranked list. Here's how it works:

• A unified priority ranking automatically combines faults, defects, predictions and maintenance status.

• The most critical assets rise to the top of the list, so the highest priority is clear at a glance.

• One click takes you from the top-ranked asset straight to a ready-to-generate work order.

Foremen no longer need to manually triage their workflows. The assets that need attention are immediately clear so they can take action quickly. 

Ready to turn your insights into action?

The five releases detailed here are just one view into how Samsara is helping physical operations move from data to decisions. To go deeper, look out for your regional newsletter or connect with other users in our Community. 

If you're not an existing customer, contact us to learn how Samsara can help improve the efficiency and productivity of your operations.