Connected Workflows Enabling Efficiency

An interaction with Rob Painter, CEO, Trimble on the company’s focus, automation, connected processes, and more.

Trimble has a long history of innovation and empowering industries. What are a few examples?

When we talk about โ€œthe whyโ€ of Trimble, we say, โ€œfeed the world, move the world, build the world.โ€ We have a mission of transforming the way the world works. How we approach that is by delivering products and services that connect the physical and digital worlds.

When it comes to innovation, we put over 15% of our revenue into research and development every year, which means weโ€™ve spent literally billions of dollars on innovation in the last three to four years.

In agriculture, weโ€™re going to need 69% more calories to feed the world’s growing population by the year 2050. How are we going to do that? We are using spatial technology to increase yield while simultaneously reducing inputs. In transportation, we have a driver shortage, with annual turnover in an average trucking company at almost 100%. Imagine losing your entire team every year. Using spatial technology to overlay routing and navigation with the business systems, we could save drivers time and help eliminate the shortage.

If we look at Trimble survey and geospatial technologiesโ€”our origin storyโ€”we are innovating at the edge of GNSS technology still today, through innovations such as tilt compensation and advanced positioning engines that are helping surveyors work more efficiently in areas in which they’ve never been able to easily use GNSS in before.

How is Trimble connecting the physical world to the digital worldโ€”and back?

Trimble is known for our positioning and sensing technologies. We think of the technology stack as the intersection of โ€œthe where, the what and the why.โ€ The โ€œwhereโ€ is spatial intelligence, the precision of the geometry.

The โ€œwhatโ€ looks like adding relevant attributes to enrich the spatial data, and the โ€œwhyโ€ looks at the problems we are trying to solve. We have a strategy of โ€œconnect and scaleโ€ to connect users, data, stakeholders, and workflows across the industry lifecycle. We build capabilities to do that.

How important is collaboration to you?

Extremely important. We see an opportunity to move from optimizing tasks to optimizing systems, which we do with partners like Esri and Autodesk.

Independent companies have tech that optimizes tasks, so the next higher order opportunity is to solve for the systemic problems.

You have acquired many companies, including those with software for imagery processing. How has that enabled automation?

Well, we haven’t talked about AI yet. eCognitionโ€™s feature extraction and Inphoโ€™s photogrammetry workflows are certainly part of our concerted strategy to complement what happens with sensors.

That’s โ€œthe whereโ€ plus โ€œthe whatโ€ and โ€œthe whyโ€ that really help enable a workflow. Many of us in this industry have been doing AI and machine learning for yearsโ€” we just didn’t brag about it.

We were doing IoT before there was IoT. We’ve been doing autonomy before there was autonomy. We’ve been doing AI since before it was AI. We’ve missed a bunch of branding waves that maybe we need to get on!

So really, it’s enabling the company to dive into the AI space with these features, and then to take it further?

Yes, and it’s not AI for the sake of AI. What are we trying to do? We’re trying to get data and turn it into information, something actionable.

“In the world of construction, by doing the work right the first time, you eliminate the rebuild, which drives a lot of that waste and inefficiency. You have a sustainability benefit using our guidance and automation construction equipment for 40-50% productivity improvements.”

The first thing you said was โ€œfeed the world.โ€ You’re leveraging technology for the sake of humanity, ultimately. And not everyone can say they’re doing that.

I think the biggest sustainability benefits come through the application of our technology. In our โ€œfeed the worldโ€ arena for agriculture, with a machine learning application, we can detect the weed from the crop and spot spray, reducing the applied herbicide by 80-90%. That’s a profound benefit to the Earth.

In the world of construction, by doing the work right the first time, you eliminate the rebuild, which drives a lot of that waste and inefficiency.

You have a sustainability benefit using our guidance and automation construction equipment for 40-50% productivity improvements.

We spend so much time talking about what it costs to build our infrastructure or buildings, but more than 80% of the lifetime cost of those assets takes place after they’re put in place. It is critical to link these workflows.

Is there anything else youโ€™d like to share?

We have talked about a connected farm, a connected site, a connected supply chain, a connected forest, connected rail, connected utilities…

We’ve moved our strategy over the last few years to connecting what we’ve got better together, so we can show up as one Trimble to you, to the industry.

When I talk about our purpose, โ€œfeed the world, move the world, build the world,โ€ that’s something worth showing up for. That’s work worth doing.

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