HOUSTON  –Trimble released a number of product announcements during the In.Sight 2018 user conference held Sept. 9-12. Bryn Fosburgh, president Trimble Transportation Enterprise said he was most excited about the news announcing the transition of TMW Systems, PeopleNet, ALK and 10-4 Systems under the Trimble name. ”This is our second combined conference and this year, what’s most exciting to me is we’re seeing a real bonding. Once you get the culture right and you get the relationships right, there is really no problem.”

He noted that since Trimble became involved in the transportation and logistics business by acquiring PeopleNet, TMW and ALK, they looked at them as separate entities. “Very well run entities, but the integration wasn’t there.” He said there were three parts to the integration between those entities: products, branding and people.

“A lot of people put a lot of effort into the brand change,” he said, “but it’s more important what’s underneath the brand,” which is where the people come in. “The people start to feel that we’re one Trimble, they feel as one team.”

That team is poised to bring a “unique” solution to its customers, he said, from the back office enterprise system to routing to mobile communication and fright visibility.

The integration allows the units to work more closely on product development and meeting customer needs.

Listening to customers is part of that he said. But there is a difference he said between listening to what customers want and understanding the problem they want to solve.

“We found that incremental change usually comes from talking with customers,” he said.” Big jumps come from know that that problem is the customers are trying to solve. ‘How can I better understand your problem,’ that’s where innovation comes from.”

Underlying the integration of the transportation business units is a platform called the Trimble Cloud that enables various groups to develop products in concert. “As we get more and more data in to the transportation cloud, you get access to more data, you can integrate that data and make more real-time decisions,” Fosburgh said. It’s not just looking backward, it’s looking forward.”

Of course that means that data security and integrity are important. Those are two different things, he said. One involves making sure the data is secure, the other means making sure the data is good. Noting that not all data is collected in the same way, he said it’s possible to get three different answers to a question based on where the data came from.

“That’s why it’s important to have a single eco-system. An eco-system that you let partners into - you want them to be there. That way you have a single source of truth.”