How HR, IT, and Operations Use Samsara Differently

A single Samsara account can serve several teams at once. HR can review workplace safety, IT keeps the cameras and gateways healthy, and Operations watches the docks, the yard, and the routes moving in and out of them. Each team opens the same dashboard, but the information each one needs from it is different, and a single default view rarely serves all three well.

Samsara handles this through custom views, custom roles, and tags. When those are built around how each team actually works, people land on the part of the platform that matters to them and do not have to sort through camera streams or settings that belong to someone else. SCVS builds that structure into Site Visibility deployments so each team starts with the view that fits its work.

The Three Tools Behind Team-Based Access

Samsara controls what each person sees and what each person can change through three features, and each one covers a different part of the job. Understanding what each does makes it easier to see how a single account can serve HR, IT, and Operations at the same time. 

The three features are:

• Custom views group up to 25 cameras into one layout, arranged by dragging each camera into position, and the cameras can come from more than one location. Samsara creates a default view for each Site Gateway automatically, but default views cannot be edited, so team-specific layouts are built as custom views. Only custom views appear in the Samsara Sites app, so a view has to exist for a location before field staff can use it on a phone.

• Custom roles set what a user is able to do. Permissions for Sites cover viewing sites, viewing cameras and footage, and editing sites and cameras, and the editing permissions also require the Organizational Admin role.

• Tags limit which cameras, sites, and gateways a user can reach, and a tag placed on a parent site also gives access to the cameras and gateways nested under it. A safety manager assigned to one warehouse, for example, can be limited to that warehouse’s cameras with a location tag.

Views group cameras into layouts, and roles and tags decide which cameras and features each person can reach, so the three work together to give each team the right access.

What HR Reviews: Workplace Safety

For HR, the dashboard works as a workplace safety record. A safety-focused custom view brings together the cameras covering the areas where safety matters most, such as docks, warehouse floors, and yard walkways, so a reviewer can open one view and see them together.

Site Visibility can send alerts when a person enters a restricted area, and footage can be searched by motion, people, and clothing color, which supports reviews like uniform compliance. Clips worth keeping can be saved to the cloud video library, where they are stored indefinitely for coaching and incident review.

An HR role can be set up to view footage for the locations that team supports, with edit permissions left to administrators. Organizations that also run Samsara dual-facing dash cams have an additional layer of access to consider. Inward-facing footage is available to admin roles and to custom roles with the relevant Safety and Cameras permissions enabled. Starting a live stream that can include inward-facing video and in-cab audio takes its own Live Streaming Overview permission. Those permissions can be left out of an HR role unless the team’s work calls for them.

Setting up HR access this way gives the team what it needs for safety reviews and keeps footage from areas outside its responsibility out of reach.

What IT Monitors: Device Health and Network Load

IT’s focus is whether the cameras and gateways are working and how they behave on the network. The device information in the dashboard is built for that work, and it gives IT a running view of every gateway and camera in the organization without a visit to the site. For each Site Gateway, IT can see:

• The connection status, along with the gateway’s name or serial number, model, and IP address.

• How many of the connected cameras are actively recording out of the total.

• Total camera bitrate and storage and retention metrics, which support decisions about camera settings that affect storage.

Together those details let IT confirm that cameras are recording and see how camera settings affect storage and retention.

IT can search across every camera in the organization by name, IP address, associated gateway, or camera model. Samsara also sends proactive notifications about system health by email and text, and device health alerts can flag a gateway or camera that has disconnected or gone offline, so an offline camera does not go unnoticed until someone needs its footage.

Samsara designs the gateway to keep bandwidth use low. Footage only streams to the cloud while someone is viewing it, and video is downsampled by default. IT can use the bitrate figures in the dashboard when planning around sites with limited connections. Editing or removing cameras requires the Organizational Admin role, so that ability sits with IT or another administrator and stays out of other teams’ roles.

What Operations Tracks: Docks, Yards, and Route ETAs

Operations teams spend their time on what is moving through the facility and what is on its way to it. Their Site Visibility views are built by site, with dock and yard cameras grouped together and available in the Samsara Sites app for supervisors who work away from a desk.

For organizations that use Samsara’s route tracking, ETAs are available on the fleet side of the platform, which is separate from Site Visibility. Operations opens it in the same dashboard as the dock and yard views, so the facility and the fleet can be checked from one login. Because the two are used together, an Operations role can be built around:

• Dock and yard custom views for each site the team manages.

• The routes list, where stops are marked green when completed on time, red when not on time, and gray when skipped.

• ETA alerts for route stop arrivals. ETAs are calculated for active routes using vehicle location and real-time traffic, and they begin showing within ten hours of a stop’s scheduled arrival.

• Dispatch settings that limit which routes a role can view based on the vehicle and driver tags that role can access, so a regional manager sees the routes belonging to that region.

Together these give Operations a working picture of the facility and the fleet, with each supervisor or regional manager seeing the sites and routes that belong to them. When a truck is running late, the team can see how that arrival affects the dock waiting on it without opening tools that belong to other teams.

How SCVS Sets Up Access by Team

Team access is part of how SCVS configures a Site Visibility deployment inside Samsara. After the cameras are installed, SCVS sets up the views and permissions that give each team its own starting point in the platform. That work includes:

• Custom views that group the cameras each team works with, such as a safety view for HR and dock and yard views for Operations.

• Role-based access permissions matched to each team’s responsibilities, so each person can see and do what their work calls for.

• Training for each team on the views and access it has been given, so people know where to go in the platform from the first day.

SCVS also stays available after go-live, which gives each team a point of contact when questions come up about its views or access.

What This Means for Organizations Sharing One Samsara Account

When HR, IT, and Operations each start from a view built for their work, people can find what they need without learning the parts that do not apply to them. Access is also easier to manage, since each role reflects a specific responsibility within the organization.

If your organization is planning a Site Visibility deployment, or already has one and wants to review how views and roles are set up, we offer a free discovery call to walk through your teams and what each one needs from the platform.

Get in touch with our team to get started.