For more than a decade, organizations in nearly every industry have been striving for digital transformation, and the stakes to get it right are high. According to recent research by McKinsey & Co., public companies that are “digital leaders” outperform “digital laggards” by a wide margin, with leaders delivering more than double the value for shareholders. 

Even under the best circumstances, deciding how and when to modernize IT systems and align on new technologies and processes can be daunting. The vast majority of organizations are trying, but success has been hard to come by. Gartner recently found that, while 91% of businesses are engaged in some form of digital initiative, only 22% of organizations are mature enough in their digital transformations to be "future ready," or, as MIT defines it, able to "innovate, engage, and satisfy customers while reducing costs." 

Moreover, digital maturity varies across industries, and in physical operations, organizations have faced uneven progress. For example, in a recent Accenture survey, 74% of respondents agreed with the statement that, “even the leaders of the logistics industry have functional areas and processes where they are far behind in terms of digital capabilities” Clearly, there is work left to be done. 

Capitalizing on data across systems is challenging.

The ability to adopt and integrate new technology quickly across an organization is critical to digital transformation. However, as the amount of data that flows through organizations increases, data silos are becoming a bigger obstacle to success. In fact, in Samsara’s most recent State of Connect Operations Report, 70% of industry leaders agreed that “our data is siloed, decreasing efficiency,” while 94% reported “breaking down data silos” was critical to their survival in the next decade.

Disparate technologies can create barriers to adopting new solutions. Combining rigid technologies—and integrating them into existing systems—can prove to be a time consuming and expensive process. According to Mulesoft, 80% of companies say that application integration hinders digital transformation. Depending on size, an organization can use hundreds of applications across their operations. However, only 29% of these solutions are integrated, creating a lack of visibility that can cause a range of problems, including operational inefficiencies that can lead to less satisfied customers and ultimately lost revenue.

The Samsara Platform is an open API-based solution that enables organizations to easily integrate new technologies.

Using an open API-based platform to support your operations is the most efficient way to scale your IT as your needs grow and change. APIs give organizations flexibility to integrate or extend new technologies and data across solutions more easily. APIs also reduce the need to rip and replace existing technology, or get locked into solutions—whether proprietary or from a third-party provider—that are no longer a good fit for your operations. 

At Samsara, our ecosystem of turnkey integrations and open API have helped customers break down data silos and extend data to additional solutions, delivering unprecedented visibility into their operations and helping to drive results. The Samsara Platform has been developed to accommodate a range of open data use cases, including:

Turnkey integrations: The Samsara App Marketplace offers more than 260 global applications across a range of physical operations needs that are easy to integrate and ready to use. 

For example, Liberty Energy, a leader in oilfield services, used turnkey app integrations to save time and money. The Liberty admin team lacked a central platform to connect back-office systems, and they were spending a lot of time tracking down data manually. With a turnkey Fiix integration, Liberty was able to sync diagnostic and DVIR data with their CMMS, saving more than 10,000 hours and $250,000 in admin costs per year.

As Michael Tuomi, the company's Health & Safety Manager, explains, "With Samsara, we could fully integrate our payroll systems, maintenance software, tax structure, and monitor our third-party drivers, all in a simple, easy-to-use platform."

Custom integrations: When the unique needs of an organization don’t fit a turnkey solution, Samsara provides a robust set of REST APIs and Webhooks to allow IT teams to integrate Samsara into virtually any system. 

One company that uses custom integrations within The Samsara Platform is Mohawk Industries, the largest flooring manufacturer in the world. With Samara's API integrations, Mohawk has been able to digitally transform their business, digitizing and connecting data across payroll, dispatch and routing, DVIRs, miles, delivery stops, customer signatures, and more. “Samsara’s API integrations are game changers for us," says Shane Faulkner, the company's Senior Manager of Logistics Technology. "We’ve already integrated Samsara with our most important softwares, and we’re leveraging as much Samsara data as we can to create our own business impact reports with greater ease than ever before.” 

Other companies are also seeing significant benefits from using Samsara's API integrations. Certarus unlocked $30 million worth of annual revenue by automating 95% of their invoices with custom integrations, while All Aboard America has used Samsara's open API to increase revenue by 30% through amended pricing and reduce their administrative workload by 20%, saving $1.6 million annually. 

Data Connectors: In addition, Samsara makes it easy to stream and visualize data across applications, such as Fivetran, Kafka, and Power BI, to give organizations granular visibility into their operations. 

Summit Materials—a large construction materials company headquartered in Denver, Colorado—integrated Samsara with Power BI and can now access real-time data on fuel usage, consumption, idle time, and emissions, allowing them to track fuel data with ease and provide regular reports to regional managers. "We’re excited about Samsara’s ability to help us close the gaps in our data so we can accurately measure our emissions and report on our progress," says Karli Anderson, EVP, Chief People & ESG Officer at the company.

With Samsara, DHL uses 19 integrations to connect data across their operations.

The Samsara Platform supports a wide range of data integration use cases that deliver accurate, timely data for large global enterprises. For example, DHL—one of the world’s leading logistics companies—uses a combination of turnkey and custom strategies, with 19 integrations to connect data across their organization and unlock business insights. These include integrations with their transportation management system (TMS); Ortec for routing and dispatching; multiple maintenance partners for electronic DVIRs; several fuel card providers for fuel transactions; and Kronos for driver hours and payroll, as well as Power BI for reporting. 

“The ease of integrating Samsara data—and the quality of the data—is key,” says Jennifer Miller, Vice President of Integrated Transportation at DHL Group. “Bringing all of our systems together with data we can trust has been a game changer.”

Help your organization reach their digital potential with The Samsara Platform. 

Open API-based platforms are critical to digital transformation, and to helping an organization succeed. Those that don’t use open platforms “cannot reach their full potential,” as Boston Consulting Group explains. 

The Samsara Platform enables digital transformation success, making it easy for any organization to integrate technologies at scale with the largest ecosystem of turnkey integrations, a flexible and open API, and pre-built data connectors. To learn more about how The Samsara Platform can help you build a flexible foundation to better connect your operations, click here.