Everything is Logistics
A podcast for the thinkers in freight. Everything is Logistics is hosted by Blythe Brumleve and we're telling the stories behind how your favorite stuff (and people!) get from point A to B.
Industry topics include freight, logistics, transportation, maritime, warehousing, intermodal, and trucking along with the intersection of technology and marketing within the industry.
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Everything is Logistics
The Incredible Technology Powering Trimble Maps
Many of us take for granted the ability to pull up a map app and it tells us the quickest route from Point A to B. Now imagine you’re a truck driver and you have to factor in weather conditions, dock loading locations, available hours at shipping facilities, the dimensions of your truck, etc… All of these factors and more can impact the efficiency of a driver and their deliveries.
This is why we have Trimble Transportation’s Director of Strategic Accounts, Dwanye Lazarre, on the show to talk about their incredible mapping technology and how it has a positive impact on the safety of drivers. Plus, learn about Trimble’s upcoming Insight conference taking place in Las Vegas in mid-September.
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Welcome into another episode of everything is logistics, a podcast for the thinkers in freight. I am your host, Blythe Brumleve, and we are proudly presented by SPI logistics, and we've got another good episode for y'all today. I'm happy to welcome in Dwayne Lazarre. He is the Director of Strategic accounts over at Trimble. We're going to be talking about mapping technology and how it impacts driver safety. So Dwayne, welcome to the show.
Unknown:Yeah. Thank you so much for having me excited to be here
Blythe Brumleve:Now, I love kicking shows off to find out how somebody got into this industry, because it's such a hidden gem, and once it kind of like grabs onto you, it never you, never really leave. So give us your backstory. How did you get involved in transportation?
Dwayne Lazarre:Yeah, interesting story. So I was in the telecommunications industry for 10 plus years, doing a lot of different things when it comes to end users and customers and building networks, basically resell channel networks, things of that nature. I did, did everything back and forth. So if you needed a high end bandwidth, or if you needed now, it's like a thing of the past, but just voice over, IP phones, right? All of that stuff, data centers, that was my background, long and short, I had a buddy that kind of transitioned into transportation, and they were looking to pull me from that company. And really what happened was, you know, I kind of told them I wasn't going to move from the position. I had to take a job where I traveled. And then ultimately, you know, they let their partner network know that I was available, and someone came up and they scooped me up, and I've been here ever since Nice.
Blythe Brumleve:So what is the time frame, I guess, of how long you've been in transportation,
Unknown:I think it's going on 13-14, years. Wow, so it's been a minute, yeah.
Blythe Brumleve:And so you were involved with a company that was purchased by triple. Am I understanding that correctly?
Unknown:Yeah. So previously, ALK was the original company that brought me from telecommunications to transportation. And then a Okay, kind of morphed into a couple different things, but ultimately, now we're Trimble maps. And
Blythe Brumleve:then what does, I guess? Because I heard a quote that they said Trimble is pretty much everything Transportation Technology. And I thought that that was a really good way to sort of kick off this conversation, because it feels like Trimble is just sneaky big, and they have, you know, kind of like a, you know, a bunch of different products, and you don't really realize how sneaky big they are until you're looking at all of the different, you know, I was aware of them in transportation, but you know, so many other things that Trimble is involved with. And we'll get into the the transportation side in just a second. But from a high level view, where is sort of Trimble, you know, covering from an industry perspective, is it all industries? Is I like Maps Connect all industries, kind of give us that eagle eye view.
Unknown:It's so interesting, right? So there's really, if you want to think of it as two halves, and Trimble does a lot of different things. But if I could simplify it, you have the TNL sector, which is what we'll dive in today, which is transportation logistics, right? So transforming the way that you move freight and trying to optimize that and really transform the way that people use the technology that's the underlying piece to everything that happens and shows up on a shelf or shows up in your home, right? That's, that's the TNL sector. But then there's also the A eco sector, which really is agriculture, or, excuse me, which is architecture, engineering, construction and owners, right? So that's the other piece that's going to be a huge part of the business. But previously it was like, called our geospatial division, so if you see anybody doing the site stuff on on the roads, if you see anybody doing stuff with construction, or there's there's a bunch of construction software, and that business just goes on and on and on and on. So those two halves kind of make up Trimble as a whole. But to your point, low key, Trimble is a very large entity that spans into so many different areas. And ultimately, you know, what I love about it is it gives us all these various data points that we can deliver into solutions for the transportation sector. So I think it's excellent,
Blythe Brumleve:yeah, and it's funny, you say that because now it all makes sense. My dad has been just to take a little, you know, sideways part of this conversation, my dad has been trying to go to the Masters golf tournament. For anybody who doesn't know, you should know what the Masters is, but he's been trying to get go to the masters for like, 1015, years now. He finally got tickets this year. Me and my brother were able to to go with them, and there were these Trimble cameras set up all over the course. But do you have any idea what those things were doing? It was some the guy couldn't really explain it to me on the course itself. Yeah,
Unknown:I don't know exactly what they're doing, but if I was there, they'd probably be there to help me find my ball after I shank it. So I think it has to do global global positioning. And a number of different things. But I don't know specifically what the cameras are doing there.
Blythe Brumleve:That was, I it was sort of a, you know, I always try to find, like, you know, whether the transportation companies or the logistics companies at major like, sporting events, and seeing those cameras all over the place, the Trimble cameras, and I was like, they have to be, and I think you're right, that it has to be some kind of, like, golf map, golf ball mapping, global
Unknown:positioning stuff, and you can see this is exactly where your ball is. So you don't have exactly penalty, right?
Blythe Brumleve:Unless it's me, I won't even talk about my my score. I just, you know, just drive the golf cart. Now that that's how embarrassing it is.
Unknown:Yeah, just take the drop. It's all good. I'll take the penalty. Okay, so
Blythe Brumleve:you've been involved with mapping technology for a long time. So you, I think you said 13 years earlier. So because of, I guess, of the evolution of maps, going from, you know, the printed material that you have in the back of your car or the back of your truck to a digital environment that you have on a variety of devices. How does that transition happen? Did it happen for you know, all at once? Or, how did you guys start building that mapping technology up? Yeah,
Unknown:it's so interesting. So the founder actually, Alan Kornhauser, that started this, all of this stuff that drivers use today? Well, we hope that they use today, right? But most of fleets out there today use some type of technology in the back office to basically understand, this is your origin pair. This is your destination pair together. That's your od pair. I want to start here and here. How do I do that? How do I get there, right? All of that stuff used to be housed in a book, so it was the household goods book, and you would basically look, look up your origin, look up where you're going. And it would give you an idea, kind of like when you used to go and look at an encyclopedia to find data. Now you just type it onto your web browser, right? So, same type of thing. So taking that and moving it from a print format to a digital format. It used to be delivered on a CD, or, excuse me, even before, CDs on a floppy, right? So floppy to get delivered, you'd install the software onto your hard drive, mostly, more than likely, some desktop computer, desktop server at your office site, and then you type in locations, and it spit out information. So that's kind of the origin, and then it's kind of morphed to where we are now, where everything is kind of plug and play, drag and drop, pop something up on your phone, look in an app, and you get all the detail that you want surrounding the location. How to get there, time to leave, best possible routes to take, what my vehicle specific parameters are, right? How tall, how heavy, how wide, how long, what am I hauling? What time of day do I want to leave? Like all that data goes into it, and then it ultimately just spits out a route line for a driver, and now they can go off about their day without having to look into a book or a call dispatch to say, how do I how do I get to this location?
Blythe Brumleve:Now, is it all sort of, you know, first party data, or do you have, I guess, sort of data partners that you you connect with, or you integrate with? What does that look like? Yeah,
Unknown:great question. So we do the vast majority of it on our own right. So we house our own data, we procure our own data, and we have several 100 folks that are on a data team that they're constantly just getting data. The problem that you run into is it's an imperfect science, right? So we may have it perfectly correct today. At you know, I'm in a
mountain time, so at 1:12pm but then now somebody just changed a road segment, added an off ramp, created a new road, or changed the height of a freeway bridge, or whatever the case may be. So it's constantly changing. So what we do is we have our base data, which is ours, that we own and maintain and procure on a random basis. Right? We constantly are updating things. And then what happens is we partner with other folks for the pieces that we're not so strong in. So when you leave the North American market, or when you leave and go into certain regions where maybe we're not as strong, we'll just partner with the best providers there. The way that I explain it to a customer is it's kind of the best of both worlds, right? So you have our data, which is tried and true, and it's been serving the industry for 30 plus years. You know, I could throw out a name like PC miler, and more than likely, everybody knows what PC miler is. It's kind of the standard and transportation. If I want to know how to start or finish a route, it's PC miler. If I want to pay a driver, it's PC miler. If I want to route something or rate something, it's PC miler. So if I'm working for the Department of Defense, it's a PC miler contract, right? So all those things are based off of PC miler. And then ultimately, what we do is that underlying data, as we continue to increase it and make it better, any regions where we're short, you know, if you go into a different part of the world where we're not. Strong, we just partner with the local data provider and then piece that together with our data. Now, does
Blythe Brumleve:triple have, like, you know, satellites for mapping technology or anything like that? Because I just did an episode on on satellites, and just had kind of a, you know, just a, Oh, wow. This is really impactful. And there's a lot of companies that are sending satellites up into space for weather, GPS needs things like that. Or is that more of a, you know, a partnership that Trimble has?
Unknown:Yeah, great question. So what we actually do in that case is we partner with the best and brightest, the best of breed, with those different things, right? So one thing that's super important to us is, like security, right? So we partner with Microsoft Azure on that, right? Something that's important to us is traffic data, so we'll partner with the leading traffic provider. You know, something that's important to us is weather results, so we'll partner with the leading weather provider. So we get all of that content, and then we deliver it in a usable format for drivers and end users.
Blythe Brumleve:That's awesome. And so it's, I don't want to say it's just a route, but there's because there's a lot of factors going into determining what the best route is. But what are maybe some other applications that some of this foundational technology is being used for, or maybe other products?
Unknown:Yeah, it's actually so many different products, right? So you have, at its base level, at its core, driver hops into a vehicle, and driver wants to get from Las Vegas. I say Las Vegas because that's where the conference is, and they want to go back home, and they want to go to Nashville, right? So they basically just need a route, and they want to get there safe and but then you start the complexity you want to know, well, what's the best time of day to leave, what the traffic conditions look like? Are there any weather incursions that I'm going to run into here? What's the height, width, wave of my vehicle? Am I allowed to dip in and out of international borders? I have a rest break coming up. When I stop at that rest break. I want to get something to eat. I need to park. What does parking look like? Because I'm going to stop in Minneapolis, right? There's all these different things that layer into it. So if you continue to zoom out and you look at people building for their day, so I have a fleet of 20 vehicles, and I need to do that exact same thing I just said, but I need to do it for 20 different drivers, right? So now it layers into your back office systems. So what's going on with your routing program? So another product we have is Appian, right? So that needs to dip into a database to get that information, and then maybe there's more on the TMS side. So we have some proprietary information in house, and we are using, you know, one of our products from trim and logistics, like a TMW suite, as your TMS system. So that also is going to deliver some specific information to the driver that's dipping in, again, to the maps database to deliver that information. Maybe you have something from a fueling perspective, and you have a fuel network that you want to layer in, again, that's dipping into the map database. So what we've really become is that underlying piece of information that everybody just kind of connects into, right? So really, we turn into a data provider, we aggregate the data and then deliver it to you in a usable format. Oh,
Blythe Brumleve:that's super cool. And it sounds like this is something hopefully, well, probably not available to, you know, that, I guess the private sector of like, you know, just a regular car, like I couldn't just go out into my SUV and be able to use Trimble maps, or, ideally, I would love to if I could, but I don't know if that's if I'm the target market for that.
Unknown:Yeah, you know. So that's really funny. You mentioned that because we're one of the few options that we completely serve the transportation industry, right? So I just call it if you are a professional driver for a living, and you drive a vehicle that is of any dimension, height, width, weight restrictions, and you have to abide by certain restrictions, then we have a solution for you, right? But on the flip side, if you're just bumping around your personal vehicle, we also have co pilot that can give you auto directions. Now, what's really nice about that is, we're trying again to blend that together where we know in that space, people just say, I'm going to make sure my phone's off, but they're going to say, hey sir, get me directions to Blake. Make sure it doesn't beep. I did it. So they're going to do that right? Or they're going to they're going to pull up Waze or going to pull up some type of mapping platform. So we compete in that space as well. And what that allows us to do is it allows professional drivers to get the look and feel of a just a natural consumer app, right? So we have to give you clean UI. We have to give you very clean directions. We have to give you traffic indicators. We have to have, you know, spoken directions, full text to speech, because we compete in that landscape. But what we do is we take all that feedback from those users, and then we adjust that, and then we provide, provide it to the professional landscape.
Blythe Brumleve:That's that's super interesting. So I in You said. Basically, almost it, not just as you know, a big semi truck, but a variety of commercial fleets. Is that accurate? Oh, yeah, if
Unknown:you are getting something delivered to your home, I would say there's a very good chance that the mappings injured behind that is provided by us awesome.
Blythe Brumleve:And that is, I heard another one of the I guess the drivers have asked, Why does Google maps show me a different mileage count than PC miler? What is happening, I guess, during that process, is it, you know, basically, Google Maps just hasn't caught up to Trimble. Or, you know, that maybe it's just a user preference on they prefer one over the other.
Unknown:Yeah, so I don't want to poke the Google bear Right. Definitely want to do that, because their reach is broader than ours, but ultimately, this is what we do, this what we focus on. So the reason people appreciate what we do is because we take all the nuances that will happen to a professional driver into play, meaning the route lines could look drastically different, because we start at this location, and we know for a fact that, well, this is a school zone, and Mr. Mrs. Driver, you're not supposed to be in this zone until after, you know, 5pm or whatever the case may be, whereas a different provider, I'm not going to poke any bears, but a different provider may just give you a route, right? And then you even have providers that just say, all I do is I kick out the distance as the crow flies. So I have two points, and I just draw a straight line to the point, and then that's the distance. Well, we all know that that's not the case, right? There's twist and turns involved, and then where we take it a step further as we really focus on that last mile piece. Because, in all honesty, just moving along the interstate. If I tell you how to get from origin to destination, more than likely you can figure out the interstate system and what interstates to take, but once you get off, if I'm in a heavy vehicle, it'd be really nice to know. Well, not only do you get off here right, once you get there, these are the twists and turns. And you take two lefts and then you take a right. But you don't just show up at the facility. You show up at the loading dock, right? So we want to route you to the specific truck entrance or truck exit gate, not just get you to the facility and the way it used to be done again, not to poke any bears, but you basically draw a.on a location and you put a circle around it, right? That's just your point radius. Well, you know, if you go to someone's home even, and you put a.on a map and you draw a half mile radius around it, that doesn't necessarily get you to their driveway, that doesn't get you to the front door, it just gets you inside that point radius circle, right? So what we did is we actually do polygonal geo fences around all those locations. So not only do you show up at the facility, you show up at the appropriate gate, you show up at the appropriate time. You enter through the right gate. Then once you're done with that delivery, you exit through the proper gate. Yeah,
Blythe Brumleve:because I imagine if you were using, you know, some other product, then it would be a super frustrating moment for you to finally get to your destination, but then find out that you have to go around the corner, you have to go in a completely different direction in order to get to that loading dock, like you said, and you're also driving a big piece of equipment. So it's a little bit more challenging on some of those, you know, more smaller roads than, say, an interstate, I would imagine. Yeah,
Unknown:no doubt. So there's instances where we can pull up the data, because we we kind of geek out on the data, but ultimately we can show you instances where your arrived apart information is completely skewed. And if you're arrived apart, information is skewed. That means the driver's time is skewed, which means that dwell times are skewed, which means that what you're basing this entire profitability on for this particular run is skewed right? Because none of that data is accurate. So if I can show you a route where the facility is within half a mile of the interstate, then if you were to just drop a.on a map and draw a half mile radius around it when I'm on the interstate, it actually shows that I arrived at this particular facility. When I did it, I still have to exit the facility or exit the interstate, make a couple twists and turns to show up at the right gate. So all of that stuff gets taken in consideration. And then if you multiply that right, if that's a few minutes, if that's five minutes, or three minutes or 10 minutes, you multiply that by how many vehicles visit that location on an hourly, daily, weekly, monthly basis, that starts to really add up. So that means that all the metrics that you've been planning this particular run on are completely inaccurate. So your pays off, your dwell times are off, your detention times are off. You may have to pay some type of penalty, and it's not the driver's fault, because the system just told me that I arrived, but I'm still on the interstate. I'm not even close, right? And then you layer in traffic, and it just compounds the issue. So, yeah, something very simplistic, we try to make it, I don't know, over overtly detailed, but simply uncomplicated from the driver's perspective.
Blythe Brumleve:Yeah, it. There was another quote that I heard from another. Another interview doing prep for this one. And it says that you can also tell the driver like the curvature of a turn, and if a driver can safely take that turn, which I imagine is insanely valuable to drivers, so they're not wasting their time, so they can't I mean, if they're not wasting their time, then they get paid more, which is what, you know, drivers always want to see. But that's crazy that you could put, you know, that kind of data point on top of all of the other data points that you just mentioned. Yeah,
Unknown:there's so much to it, right? If we even go deeper down the rabbit hole, we start talking about the high rollover locations, right, something that you're talking about right now. We start to talk about traffic slowdown alerts. So if I'm driving a big rig right, and I'm cruising on the interstate, I'm going 65 miles per hour. It takes longer for me to stop than it does you in your personal vehicle going 65 miles per hour, right? I have a lot more tonnage behind me, so we even give you slowdown alerts where Mr. Mrs. Driver, as you approach this location and the next five miles, the speed is going to decrease from 65 down to 10 miles per hour, right? So that shouldn't be a harsh braking incident, because the driver doesn't know it should be. Hey, we have the guidance and information. Let's deliver that to the driver. That's that's one thing. The other thing may be road surface conditions, right? So, Mr. Miss, a driver, you're entering a location where you're going to encounter, you know, sleep or not, that it's just snowing, but what do the road conditions look like? And then how's that impacting traffic? And then how's that impacting your drive time, which is ultimately going to impact your ETA. So when I when I say, we kind of geek out on this stuff. We kind of do. Some people are like, Why Why can't you just tell me where to go? Like, we can tell you to where to go, but we want to make sure that it's accurate. We want to make sure it's precise and that we're giving you all the data to make your driver's life easier.
Blythe Brumleve:So do you have, like, one or two, like, favorite data points that you kind of like to geek out on me personally? Yes,
Unknown:you know, I think that the data point that I I like the best is, you know, how can we impact the driver's day? And if I just were to simplify it, and so I didn't know this growing up, but I grew up in the back of a sleeper cab, right? So, born back east, and my dad used to drive trucks from Buffalo into Canada, right? That was his run, and not until I was maybe 15 years old. And my dad had a small trucking company when he moved to LA that they really told me, like, yeah, used to be in the back of a sleeper cap for the first three years of your life. I'm like, Oh, really. Okay, whatever. And, you know, and then fast forward, I had no interest in being in trucking or transportation, but I would see some of the struggles my dad would have with his drivers, and how much it meant when a vehicle was not making money, not picking up loads, not going to the yard. And now fast forward that I'm in that industry. You know, I think that the biggest key to success, to me is, how can we positively impact this driver's day? So key data point to answer your question is, how much time can I give back to my driver? How much time can I give back to him so that they can either be more efficient and make another drop, right? Or they can get done early and go home to their family. So in my mind, it's just driver efficiency, and what can we do to improve that?
Blythe Brumleve:Yeah, that's great answer. I feel like that's a social media clip, or it's already like making a mental note to use that. And it also sounds like that's really where your maybe your your industry knowledge, or your industry expertise, got started, and you didn't even really realize it. And
Unknown:even though, yeah, I was absorbing it through osmosis, I had no clue. So,
Blythe Brumleve:so talk to me a little bit about, you know, we've talked a lot about mapping technology and things like that, and, you know, being able to overlay, you know, all of these different factors that you've talked about, I imagine that has a massive impact on safety scores, safety ratings, just overall driver knowledge around safety. How did the two sort of play nicely together between, like a safety culture and then the technology aspect?
Unknown:You know, it's funny you say that. So going back to something I mentioned earlier, safety is key, right? And the safety starts with we need to make sure that we're securing the customer's data. We need to make sure that the solutions we're delivering to them are safe. And once that solution is in house, that again, that's safe, right? That's that's kind of that, that bridge there. And I think when you translate that to from cyber security to physical security, that takes into consideration not putting our drivers in the wrong place at the wrong time, not obviously, you know the obvious one, you'll see. You can go, you can go look at a whole bunch of pictures, and I feel bad when you see it, but drivers in these ridiculous situations, right, where you have to call a tow truck and you have to be pulled out, or you rip the top off. Off the trailer, or you're in some weird Jackknife situation with your trailer, all that. That's just no point. All right, that's just all bad stuff. So taking that in consideration, making sure that the vehicle is physically safe, the driver is physically safe, then you take that a step further, and you still have all the fines and different things associated with that. So I think where it really comes together is making sure that the data safe, making sure that the data we deliver keeps the driver and vehicle safe, and making sure that the product that we're offering gives the driver the flexibility to be safe at all given times. So those things play off of their driver's score, and it helps with their efficiency again.
Blythe Brumleve:So how do you know? Because I just thought again about that, that same quote about, you know, just preventing, like, you know, the truck turning over, trying to take a too sharp of a turn. How does it? What does the process look like that? You see an action being taken like that in a truck, and that's, you know, something that you can look back on and be like, Oh, well, this is something that, you know, I could have done this here. When does the, I guess, the process happen of taking a corrective action versus a preemptive action, where it turns into, okay, we have enough data around this particular point, we are going to turn that into, almost like a warning system or an alert system for the driver. What i Does that make sense?
Unknown:No, that makes perfect sense. And to your point, you know, I consider us a proactive technology, meaning all those things that you're talking about, we take them in consideration before the driver even starts the route. So understanding where you are, where you're going, what type of vehicle you're in, we'll prescribe a route line that takes out all of those. I'll just call it gotcha moments, right? Oh, gotcha. I can't make this turn. Gotcha going up the wrong Hill. I'm carrying potato chips. They're going to pop because he took me to the wrong elevation, right? All right. Gotcha. I'm in a Speed Zone speed trap. All right. Gotcha. This is a low bridge, right? So what we do is we do our best to take all that information out of the route line and then deliver the driver a line, a route line that's actually going to get them from start to finish, but get them there safely and efficiently, so that stuff doesn't happen. Now, being that as it may, humans are going to do, a human they're going to do, right? We're not all Robo taxis, so what happens is, a driver may deviate from a route. We give the fleet functionality to say, Okay, well, how strict Do you want this adherence? Right? If a driver does start to deviate from a route, do you want notification in cab? Do you want notification in the back office? Once that happens, we're now tracking that route, right? We started from your origin, and everything was great. You followed the route line. You deviated at mile marker 65 or whatever the case may be. So mile marker 65 we can start to send you notifications that you're out of route and try to get you back on Route. But let's say someone just doesn't listen because they're hard headed and they know better than the computer, which is fine, still, in that instance, if you deviate and take a different route, we do not put you on a truck route that is not safe, meaning you're too high for this bridge, you're going under, right? You're too wide for this road. You're going over, you're too heavy for this bridge that you need to carry. Like we still take that information out of the data, and we continue to alert the driver as they approach that, and we give them ulterior options to get out of that. Now, even in that instance, sometimes what happens is drivers are still going to do what drivers are going to do. And they can be bullheaded and be like, Nope, I'm still going to go along. What happens in the back end is we're tracking all that information. We're tracking the heading, the speed, the location, the time of day, the deviation notes, and then once they rejoin the route, all of that information is delivered back to the back office.
Blythe Brumleve:I have to go back to what you just said. Did you say that if a driver the elevation gets too high, the potato chips will pop?
Unknown:Yeah, that is that is, that was just sitting in the back of my head. I was like, No, no way. How did they deliver potato chips? Then elevation can't go through rocky mountains or certain things, because potato chips will pop. There's also not, not so much popular now, but years ago, when plasma was the thing, plasma TVs have to be under a certain elevation as well, or else the crystals and the plasma would pop. So
Blythe Brumleve:I never knew that that's, that's, that's going in the social clips too. That's,
Unknown:yeah, keep your potato chips right. Use our products, right? So what, what happens in you just can't get potato chips in the Rocky Mountains like you gotta take a different path. You just so you can still go through the Rocky Mountains. You just can't take certain roads through it because the elevation on those roads are too high. Oh, wow.
Blythe Brumleve:Okay, so that that's good to know, because I'm actually going to Colorado in a couple weeks, and so I'll, I'll know that I cannot take potato chips there, because the bags will pop. That's got to be that was probably an interesting to. Discovery for one poor driver that's hitting an elevation too high and all of the potato chips just pop at once.
Unknown:I'd love to see the original use case for that. That's fine.
Blythe Brumleve:Okay, so how the buzzword, obviously, is AI machine learning, even though these things have been around for, you know, a little while, and sort of our definition or our understanding of these things is evolving. But how does AI and machine learning play a role in Trimble's products? That's
Unknown:a great question. It actually plays a very large role. It's something that we've been utilizing, you know, especially in mapping for years, right helping us make the right decisions, understanding, time of day, routing, because in our solution, you can do something real time, meaning you hop in the cab, or, you know, an operator hops on a screen and looks at a location and says, what does that look like? But then we also have the historical data, so go back and change that to, I want to leave at 3pm on a Thursday. What do traffic indicators look like? Right? And then help me make the right decisions. So as far as routing is concerned, we've been using machine learning and AI for quite some time. I think now we're just taking it to another level within our product set. So understanding the benefits that this can offer, understanding how this can take, you know, 50 different solutions, you know, quantum computing, and spit out the perfect answer in, you know, a few seconds, as opposed to having to recalculate somebody being offline for 15 minutes, right? All that stuff is critical again, because we talk about efficiency and effectiveness for drivers. So I think this is going to continue to play a larger role within our product set, and it's just going to help us maintain that level of excellence when we deliver a route to a driver, and it's going to do that across all of our products. And
Blythe Brumleve:so when you as you know, Director of Strategic accounts, when you're talking to maybe your current customers or your prospective customers, what are some of the questions that they're asking, and then how are you answering some of those common, you know, frequently asked questions,
Unknown:yeah, so what we find with the strategic place is, I think ultimately what we try to establish is, hey, we think we have everything that you're going to possibly need, but we're not arrogant enough to think, like, that's it, right? So they always ask, like, what can you do for us? And our answer is typically, well, where do you try to go? What are you trying to get accomplished? Because I think one thing we do very well is, if you sit here and we're having this, this interview on 821, right? We're on the pod 821, 2024 our goal is, if we sit down next year, we have either reintroduced things that have been lost, or we've improved on products, or we've delivered something completely new, but we're constantly looking to improve on what we have, so we don't stay stagnant. That's like no good. So anytime you talk to us, especially when we talk about the mapping sector. We're constantly improving and integrating those products so that they can offer additional benefits to the user community. So when they say, what can you do for us? And we say, well, what are you trying to get accomplished? You know, the answer typically turns into, okay, that's super interesting. Have you thought about it this way or this way or that way? And then we're pretty much all comes together as we now are going to be designing a product. We're going to take the things that we know we have today, that you said, are pain points, and we're going to solve for that. But now what we're going to do as a strategic partner is we're going to work with you, the end customer, or the ELD partner in between, or the TMS provider, or whoever it may be, we're going to work together, install the product like we talked about, get that up and running so it's installed within your environment. But now let's continue to learn from that. Right? We talk about AI machine learning. Well, we like to do human learning as well, where we constantly hear what you're talking about. We get that feedback that goes back to our engineering teams and our development teams and our leadership teams. We sit in rooms and discuss, hey, we talked to four different customers this month. They had these issues. I think if we were to put together this type of solution, it would meet the needs of what we see is coming next, right? So that's that's really the relationship we try to get into, where it's not one sided. We're not delivering a product and you're cutting us a check. We're delivering a solution that's solving issues, and then we're constantly working together to deliver additional solutions for you and your customer base.
Blythe Brumleve:That's That's awesome to hear. And I imagine with a lot of those conversations that you have, you're going to be having some more of those conversations coming up at Trimble's insight conference that's taking place in mid September in Las Vegas. Tell us a little bit about the conference, what folks can expect, you know, all that good stuff.
Unknown:Yeah, so it's, it's like our go to event. It is our Super Bowl. If I really do feel bad for our marketing team. Teams during this time, because it's like they're they're working 20 hours a day trying to get stuff buttoned up right, and not, don't even get me started on the on the events team, where they have to arrange all the talent and who's on stage and at what time? So big shout out to them. They do an amazing job. But again, September 15 through the 17th at the Venetian resort in Las Vegas, that's where we get down. What we ultimately do is, it's a thought leadership where we bring in the brightest minds within transportation. We had, I think, over 500 businesses, couple 1000 people were there last year. And we just want to continue to grow this thing. But what we do, which is, you know, we feel like it's unique, is we want to bring everybody together, right? So you will have somebody sitting in the conference room that is a competitor, and then a competitor, and then a customer in between, and we want all those three to shake hands and be like, hey, hey, it's not about you or me. It's about what can we do together, right? And that's kind of the way we approach it. So come out. Come check it out. It's amazing. We're going to have Craig Fuller, the CEO of freight waves, doing an event. We're going to have Dan Murray from a tree there doing an event. There's going to be something that you're going to walk away with, right? You're either going to learn more about a product that you currently have, where it's going, what the roadmap looks like, and how it can benefit your business. Or, guess what, if somebody's not doing what they should do as your current provider, you're going to find their competitor that's going to be trying to earn your business. So from a customer's perspective, if you truly want to be courted, you should show up at this event.
Blythe Brumleve:Yeah, it's that collaboration over competition mindset, which I think is really great about, you know, events like insight and so I guess, what is one thing that you're personally looking forward to experiencing at the at the conference, is a particular speaker? Is it maybe one of the networking events? You're at the Venetian so you're right next to the sphere, so you gotta catch a show there, maybe, which is incredible. I don't know if you've seen that yet, but it is incredible. What are you personally looking forward to the most? Yeah,
Unknown:I think, you know, I I have a speaking engagement there now, not so much. Looking forward to my stuff. What I'm looking forward to the most? It sounds so boring and so vanilla, but honestly, from a strategic perspective, we try to meet as many of our customers one on one as possible in a two and a half day span, which means we're starting at 730 in the morning, and we're going to 730 at night, and then there's after hours at the bar, or whatever it is, but we want to try to meet face to face with as many strategic partners as we can understand what's happening in their environment, and then We do the same thing from our partner network, right? Because we work with all the major ELD providers and all the different business carriers, so it's a great opportunity to get in front of them. And then the goal is, ultimately, like, I really get a kick out of this. When we're sitting someplace and XYZ customer says, you know, I'm having this problem. It may or may not be our problem, but maybe we know the right person, and we say, hold on. We go walk. We're gone for 510, minutes. We bring back the person that's going to help solve it. We're sitting there having a cocktail or a beer or just hanging out, and we just solved an issue that they've had as a pain point for quite some time, but because they didn't have the right people in the room, they could never solve it right? So that those are the moments I look forward to, and those are the ones I get really excited for.
Blythe Brumleve:Yeah, definitely not boring at all. I think customer insights that every major business, or just in if you're a business owner in general, should be talking to their customers, because if you're that's where I think the golden nuggets are, like what you were talking about. And I think that those kind of conversations, it's so much easier to take place at an event like insight, versus, you know, just trying to, you know, almost like pester your customer via email. To give you those kind of insights. You get those insights at insight.
Unknown:Yeah, double insight. All right. Dwayne,
Blythe Brumleve:last couple questions here, anything else that you feel is important to mention that we haven't already talked about,
Unknown:you know, I think the the one thing that I'd like to throw out there is, you know, we, like I mentioned earlier, we know that it's an imperfect science what we do. We also know that even though we try to please all the people all the time, it's not really possible. I would say the thing that I'd want people to know about us is that we honestly do care about each one of those customers that we have on board, and as hard as we work to earn their business, I feel like that's just kind of the first phase of the relationship, especially what we do in the mapping sector is we have to make sure that we earn our key like every single day the rents do right every single day. We gotta make sure that we're bringing value to that customer set. When we're not bringing value, we want to make sure that customers know that they can tell us that, like, Hey, I bought this for this reason. You guys aren't holding up here into the bargain. Where can we go from here? So I think the biggest thing about us. Says, We want to make sure that customers know, again, we're not just trying to sell you something and then disappear, right? We don't want to you, you give us a check and then we did that. That's not how we do it, right? It's this is a long term relationship, and we want to make sure that we constantly have that open communication and that positive feedback or negative feedback, but we just want to make sure that we're getting some type of feedback. Yeah, definitely,
Blythe Brumleve:it's not just about getting customers. It's about keeping them happy too. So alright, Dwayne, where can folks follow you? You know, get connected with with somebody over at triple transportation, all that good stuff. Register for insight. Yeah,
Unknown:please. So you can reach out. You can register for insight. I should probably know that website off the top of my head. Well,
Blythe Brumleve:we'll make sure. I'll put a link in the show notes, just to make it easy for folks. So we'll make sure to put it in there. And then also the, I think it's transportation.trimble.com, and then for folks who want to connect with you, where can they where can they connect with you?
Unknown:You can follow me on LinkedIn. If you want to sync up, you can definitely come to insight. I'll be on stage for an event or so, and you could see me there. Or if you just want to chop it up, you know, you can reach me at dwayne_lazar@trimble.com
Blythe Brumleve:Awesome. Well, this is a great conversation. Thank you for, you know, geeking out with me on on some of these, you know, mapping technology, and how this all sort of fits together, because I think that that's an aspect of this industry that isn't talked about enough. So appreciate the conversation and and hope to see that insight.
Unknown:Yeah, this was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
