LAS VEGAS – Trimble’s integration of its telematics business with that of Platform Science may have stolen the show at Insight, the enormous conference for Trimble’s customers, but what remains in Trimble’s transportation segment is getting a significant upgrade as well.
What’s headed to Platform Science is telematics. More specifically, the center of the combined transfer/equity stake transaction is Trimble’s ELD business (NASDAQ: TRMB).
But at the Insight conference earlier this month, the disclosure of the Platform Science deal came with a series of technology enhancements in the other parts of Trimble’s transportation sector that Michael Kornhauser, vice president of transportation and logistics, said were all driven by the same theme: connectivity.
Remaining at Trimble’s Transportation Group are transportation management system offerings that are housed in its enterprise group. The segment also has a maps division and Transporeon, the recently acquired German company whose transportation management offerings are being extended into North America.
It also contains Vusion, a tool for compliance with fuel taxes and other regulations.
“The biggest thing that we’re hearing from our customers is that they want their technology to be connected,” Kornhauser said in an interview with FreightWaves at Insight. “And when I say connected, it really means integrated.”
‘Swivel chair integration’
Kornhauser defined what that means, and it starts with something he called “persona-based functionality.” He used another term to describe what Trimble’s rollout of upgrades tries to avoid: “swivel chair integrations,” which suggests an image of somebody shifting from one application to another instead of being able to stay in the same place.
A “swivel chair integration,” Kornhauser said, is one that “really means functionality popping up in new windows or new applications.” But what customers want, Kornhauser said, is an “all-in-one connected workflow.”
“They want this stuff to be seamless, and that’s what we’ve been focused on building,” he said.
The connectivity theme came up again when Kornhauser was asked where he saw the FreightTech industry headed in the next 10 years. His answer: “I would get back to things being connected, things being integrated, everything that we build seamlessly working within the workflow of our customers.”
It would be a new type of integration. Previous steps to integrate systems – and leave behind the swivel chair – had a “history of being bespoke,” he said. They would be “customers by custom, and they are quite difficult to manage over time. Each customer basically has a different kind of version of the software.”
And so the press releases announcing the new functionalities came out on the first day of Insight, backed by dozens of sessions aimed at Trimble’s customers, with both the old and new aspects of Trimble’s transportation sector offering on display.
Changing what’s in the cloud
In line with moving away from “bespoke” solutions, Trimble is embracing what Kornhauser called a “multitenant, cloud-based product” for its TMS.
The Trimble TMS already sits in the cloud. But as Kornhauser described it, the current system is based on providing customers with “individual instances of the software for individual customers.”
The move to the multitenant system means that “it’s all kind of one instance of the application that serves all the customers.”
Some of what else was announced was new. The idea behind “modules,” for instance, is that the entire offering is not going to be presented all at once to customers who would then be tasked with onboarding a massive number of changes.
“We are delivering those pieces over time, connected to the existing TMS that our customers use,” Kornhauser said. “We feel that’s a great way for them to experience the new functionality without having to do a full rip and replace of a TMS, which is a significant undertaking for a carrier.”
Transporeon comes to North America
One big addition to Trimble’s offerings is the North American version of Transporeon Visibility. Trimble purchased Transporeon, a German company, last year in an almost $2 billion transaction that was announced in late 2022.
The introduction of Transporeon Visibility in North America, if successful, has geographic advantages – it takes a mostly European product and stretches its footprint – and gives carrier-focused Trimble a wider customer base with brokers and shippers.
“Transporeon has a transportation management platform, and what that really means is that it’s connecting the players across the transportation ecosystem, from shippers to brokers to carriers,” Kornhauser said. “So that gives us a larger play with shippers and a larger play with brokers.”
The visibility capabilities of Transporeon – tracking shipments and vehicles in real time and providing ETA data – will now be able to be provided to Trimble’s carrier customers, who are shippers, he added.
Trimble, in the prepared statement announcing the launch of Transporeon North America, said the product is available for its carrier customers now and will be available by the end of this year for other customers, such as shippers.
Among the other new functionalities announced at Insight, some of which are already available and others which are coming soon:
- A new version of Trimble CoPilot, its navigation system. Trimble touts improved map displays, along with a “predictive parking” feature that includes peak parking hours and predicted availability of parking at numerous locations.
- TMT Road Call, which helps a fleet manage mechanical issues that develop on the road. Among other features, it has a database of more than 5 million businesses to service maintenance issues.
- Trimble Inspections, which will allow “back-office fleet managers to create configurable checklists based on load and truck type as well as specific business needs.”
The deal between Platform Science and Trimble will see the telematics/ELD business of the latter be transferred to the former in return for Trimble receiving a 32.5% stake in Platform Science.
It would take Trimble directly out of the ELD business, but it’s a more forward-looking way to exit that business, which has always been seen as ripe for consolidation several years after the ELD mandate went into effect, creating a huge pool of equipment suppliers that was always destined for a shakeout.
“We’re starting to see a third wave,” Kornhauser said, its predecessor “waves” being “before ELD and then the ELD mandate.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there was additional consolidation,” he said. “There are a lot of players out there, and some are doing better than others. I think that kind of speaks for itself.”
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