The High Cost of Wrong Turns: How Location Data Protects Freight Margins with Rishi Mehra

[00:00:00] Hello, friends. Welcome to Logistics of [00:00:30] Logistics. My name is Joe Lynch. Thank you so much for s- joining us today. Today’s topic is the high cost of wrong turns, how location data protects freight margins, with my friend Rishi Mehra. How’s it going, Rishi? I’m doing great, Joe. So if I’m interviewing you, we must be at Trimble Insight.

Yes, it seems like an annual occurrence out here. I’m always happy to sit down with you here. Yeah we are in beautiful San Diego at the Trimble Insight Conference, and I’ve interviewed Rishi the last two years. This is the third year in a row. But it’s always [00:01:00] interesting because he works in a critical part of the business.

So Rishi, please introduce yourself and your company and where you’re normally based. Yes. Rishi Mehra. I’m responsible for all of our mapping and routing solutions within Trimble’s transportation and logistics segment. I’m based out of Princeton, have been there for the last 12 years in the Trimble offices that we have in Princeton delivering the right solutions based on the needs of shippers, carriers, brokers, helping freight move.

So give us the high level of what [00:01:30] Trimble does, ’cause we’ve just– we’ve been at the conference, and we’ve had a g- lot of great presentations. But give us the high level of what Trimble provides, and then we’ll get into what you- Yeah … and your division do. Let’s focus on the logistics, transportation and logistics segment, because Trimble has three different segments.

Our construction segment, our field system segment, and transportation logistics segment. I am within the transportation logistics segments. We service the needs for our shippers, carriers, brokers with various solutions. And not just solutions. In today’s age, it is the platform that [00:02:00] connects the shippers and the carriers, and within that platform sits Trimble maps, where we provide the mapping and routing solutions for using PC Miler mileage, for navigation solutions, for utilizing the right miles, the right time at every turn to get the customers to the safe place to help freight move properly.

So high level product portfolio, if you would look at, we categorize it into three sections. Our carrier TMS and maintenance solutions- Yep … which you heard this [00:02:30] morning at our keynote speech, how we’re modernizing all of those solutions- Yep … for our customers and embedding AI capabilities in there. Our freight procurement, our autonomous procurement, dock and yard solutions, and the full network, which was formerly with our Transporeon entity that is underpinning a lot of these new capabilities that we’re building out.

And then our mapping routing optimization solutions, which earlier used to be called LK Trimble Maps- … and now it’s the mapping and routing within our TNL segment. And what about this [00:03:00] new thing that we’ve all been talking about, which is ArcAgent? The Trimble Arc Agent is a unique, one-of-a-kind, purpose-built agent for the transportation logistics segment.

This is one agent with many skills. You’ve been in this space so long, you don’t want someone to just be a singular focused person just doing- … phone calls, check calls. What we have reimagined Arc as building it from the ground up with safety principles in mind, and a single agent that can do all the tasks that you ask it to do, which are [00:03:30] all available as skills.

Just like we as humans acquire skills, you configure the skills in Arc, and it does the work for you. Yep. I was asking you before we hit the record button a question about Arc Agent. A lot of times when you give a thousand shipments- … 2,000 shipments, there’s always the group of shipments at the bottom that are incomplete.

They’re missing cost data or delivery or something that I need to process it. And when I still doing logistics, I would [00:04:00] ask my team, “Go through those and figure out what’s what.” And at that point, I think sometimes you have young people guesstimating things. And if it was supposed to be there by 11:00 by 11 o’clock, and it got there at 11:07, they’re like, “Eh, 10:55.”

Nobody knows, right? Yes. And I don’t want that. I don’t want that for them. I don’t want it for me. It’s tedious work. Now you t- I asked the question, “Can I have Arc Agent do it?” So please talk about Arc Agent stepping in [00:04:30] doing some of the work that might require them pull from a whole bunch of different systems, come with that answer.

So that’s the most important thing. A connected ecosystem is critical for the functioning of any AI agent, and Arc operates on those same principles. It has the necessary skills. So what you just described, finding data across these connected systems, even if they’re not connected, but as long as it has access- Right

to the data. The data has to exist. Our agent is not built to come up with things on its own. That’s not what we want our agent to do. No [00:05:00] imagination. No imagination out there. The hallucination factor is zero. So we wanted to procure the data, which would’ve taken someone long hours to do. We need to get access to the data, find out what the missing pieces were for those bottom five percent of the shipments, get that information populated in with the actual facts.

There’s no fudging of information. Yep. It’s what reality is. Yep. Before we get into, I have two other things I wanna talk to you about before we get into mapping. The first one was, I always hear people talk about t- transportation [00:05:30] technologies, TMSs and all the things you guys provide. And there’s always a new TMS, and what they’ll always say is, and fill in the blanks they’ll name the oldest transportation management system- and they go, “They’re all built on the old s- the old stuff.” And what I’ve come to understand over the la- not for sure here- … but at other conferences I’ve been at, is the old companies, they, first off, they have embedded customers who are massive. And so they can’t move [00:06:00] really fast on everything. They have to be really safe.

But they’re constantly updating. So I just came from the same presentation Michael Kornhauser was giving, as you did. It seems like you guys updated everything in this last year. So what has happened over the last year is AI has transformed what we can deliver. The work that we can put into enhancing the capabilities of our products, building out new features, building out new workflows to service the needs of the logistic industry, [00:06:30] that’s where our focus has been.

It has opened up the opportunity for us to do something which might have taken 10 years- … to do it in a much shorter time span, and the results of that are what you saw in the keynote speech earlier- … by Michael Kornhauser. We have taken that effort to say, “We will meet our customers where they are.”

We don’t need them to rip and replace, lift and shift- … move things, take a onerous task where they’re gonna lose million dollars of freight. Through that journey, we will help them- … upgrade their experience. My experience in software in general is, the people who adopted [00:07:00] every software first were the biggest companies.

Fortune 500 companies, Fortune 1000, Fortune 5000. And they don’t ever want, as you said, to rip and replace. They don’t want any risk at all. So if you said, “Hey, we got this AI agent, and we’re winging it you guys are a test case,” they’d be like, “Oh whoa.” There are all these companies coming up dime a dozen out there who want to build out capabilities and just throw it out into the market, a new shop coming up with five, 10 engineers who are saying, [00:07:30] “We have this AI agent that’s gonna do all these things for you,” but it doesn’t understand the domain.

It doesn’t have the safety guardrails built around it. The minute your data gets compromised, you have broken the whole ecosystem. Yep. I, in the past, I never said this as much as I say it now. If I was selecting — I was in charge of selecting a 3PL, if you and I today were at a big company and somebody said, “Go select a new 3PL,” we would say, “We wanna look at the tech.”

That would be one of- Yes … the top things we’re looking at. I also wanna look at fraud, [00:08:00] cybersecurity, and all the stuff related to making sure I don’t get my stuff stolen, that you don’t put my business at risk for moving my freight, and those would be my top priorities. And I feel like, A brand new TMS and a brand new lot of other technologies.

If you have 15 guys in your startup and you’re moving fast and breaking things and innovating, that’s great. I wish you well, but I would worry if I was a large company And I think it’s very right to worry. There i- there is a reason where you have to [00:08:30] go with a large organization who has the depth, who has the knowledge of the market, who has the safety guardrails in place.

The amount of money Trimble invests in safety of every software development life cycle on our cybersecurity initiatives and in the AI initiatives, it is all safety first. Yep. That’s the guarantee we bring to help you ensure you’re not getting into trouble from a logistics provider perspective. Yeah. La- last year this conference was in New Orleans, which was just as nice as this year, and I interviewed Jonah McIntyre from your team.

Yeah. [00:09:00] And he used the term, and I love this, when we were talking about developing. He said, “We’re using AI to do a lot of the coding.” He said, “But we always have people on it.” He used the term ethical crumple zone. Meaning, yes, we’re using AI, and but it’s, you can’t let it run wild. Yeah. I still have to be able to say, “We can– we are responsible for this code,” not a nameless, faceless code.

Nameless, faceless AI. I have to be able to say, “My team created this.” They [00:09:30] used AI. Yes. But I still own it, and I will still be responsible for it. It’s human in the loop, human validated. It’s the credibility of Trimble behind it. Yep. Speaking of the credibility of Trimble, why is this conference so important?

By the way, y- there are so many of your partners here some of whom you compete with in some other realms, but it’s a respectful… you compete. Where you collaborate, you collaborate. But also, there’s a ton of customers here, and I ask people, “Why are you here?” And they go, “My [00:10:00] customers come to this conference.”

And so why is this so important to Trimble? It’s important because we’re able to get everyone who’s involved in movement of freight in a single place. It doesn’t matter whether you’re using our TMS or you’re using a competing TMS, but you’re connected to our shippers. You’re using us in the navigation space.

You’re using a different telematics provider. All those are connection points. And when you’re building a platform where you’re helping all the participants interact with each other, building that network for [00:10:30] ensuring freight movement is the most efficient one, that’s what we expect out of this conference, whether it is our end customers across the ecosystem or our partners coming in, discussing ideas, things that you heard Michael talk about, ideas that are discussed now.

We can deliver new innovation and solutions in our next event, which benefits everyone in the industry. Yeah. There’s a lot of announcement. A lot of your partners come in and make announcements here too, and been a great conference so far. I wanna get into mapping. That’s obviously what you do.

[00:11:00] So talk about PC Miler and your mapping. And w- I should also mention, for people who don’t get into this day to day- Every freight contract I’ve ever seen references PC Miler. Talk about what PC Miler is and why that is so important, not only to Trimble, but to the whole industry. Yes. It goes back 40 years.

It’s been 40 years, and this June we release our 40th an- version, the annual release of PC Miler, which everyone in the industry relies on. It acts as the [00:11:30] currency through which freight is contracted. When a shipper wants to move the freight from point A to point B, those lanes that are bid out on a contracted freight manner, there’s a mileage associated with it, and those miles are set on a specific version of PC Miler.

And PC Miler has been built over all these years, taking not only just the government freight data. People think it’s easy to build out and aggregate commercial data, but it’s years of knowledge that goes into interpreting that data, making sure the right modifications are made [00:12:00] to generate the right route.

If a shipper and a carrier need to contract and the freight needs to actually move, when we say from PC Miler it’s 145 miles between that origin destination pair, it has to be 145 miles. It cannot be 140, it cannot be 147, because then one party suffers. Yeah. You said to me also, I think last year or the year before, you said and it’s also little things, and we’ll get more into this in a minute.

But you said, if you directed me to the front door of a facility, and [00:12:30] it’s a massive industrial facility, you go, “First off, I don’t know where I’m at, and and I gotta deliver it the next five minutes or I’m gonna be late.” And I’m looking, going, “Do I go down the street and turn left or do the other way and turn right?”

So you said, “It’s gotta get me to the dock that I’m delivering to, not- Not the front … not the corporate office.” Not the corporate office. And that we still stand behind. That’s a big initiative we continue to invest in, where we have over six million places now where we can navigate you right [00:13:00] to the specific dock or the place where you need to deliver the equipment.

We’re talking about data center construction, so you spoke about AI. There are huge, massive complexes. That’s not a small building- No. … where you walk into and deliver something. You have to know where to get at the right time and make your delivery and move out, and that’s the investment we are making with the Trimble Places initiative.

Yeah. And that PC Miler I think- You could, if you were going from New York to LA, you could easily be 50 miles off if you just said I had to take this [00:13:30] because of construction. I had to do this.” And that’s why we need one standard, and that is become the standard. If it says, PC Miler says it’s this much from this, from point A to point B, everybody says, “Yes, we agree.”

They’re not saying, “Oh, yeah, w- use whatever system. Oh, you have something on your mo- mobile phone that you use for Navigation … navigating back and forth to your kid’s school?” No, that ain’t working. That, that’s not gonna work. That doesn’t have up-to-date information, that doesn’t have the right bridge heights, that doesn’t have the weight restrictions-

that doesn’t guide you [00:14:00] when you need to take a break. Yeah. So you said this also to me in the past. You said, “If you see a truck, some meme where a truck is wedged underneath a bridge- Yes … they are not using, they’re not using Trimble technology to route.” Yes. It’s so funny, our team still looks out and gets all those press releases and puts it up on the screen and says, “This was not Trimble.

We guarantee that.” Yeah the no bridge crash- Yes … guarantee. So I wanna get into this, some of these topics. [00:14:30] Precision miles and margins. So right now, it seems like we’re in a never-ending crisis in this business. We had the freight recession, I don’t know, three and a half, four years. Then as soon as that seemed to end, we ended up with the tariff stuff that was confusing.

Now we have diesel really expensive. We’ve had the non-domicile driver issue. Now Craig Fuller said today that he believes that we have a driver shortage again- Yeah … because we got rid of a lot of drivers. And, It’s [00:15:00] harder than ever, and I’m getting sick and tired of saying this, but it’s harder than ever to make a buck in the transportation business.

How does this Precision Miles, how do you guys help me get Precision Miles? So what’s important is when you write the contract using PC Miler, you have contracted to move freight from point A to point B for a certain number of miles. You can’t let the driver just run wild with it. You can’t just get

tell the driver, “Go from A to B and get to the right place.” The precision comes in to say, “What you’ve contracted on is what we want you [00:15:30] to plan on.” And it m- … If it’s a long route, how do you plan using the fuel stops along the way? You can dictate the exact route, compare it with what your mileage was for the contract.

You can see what you’re asking the driver to drive. What’s the difference in miles, what’s the difference in toll costs, what’s the difference in time in there, and that would- … impact the driver pay. You can set those routes in there so you know where every dollar is being spent. In this freight economy, it is

People say there are signs of freight economy improvement. [00:16:00] It’s not that the demand is increasing. It is supply constraint recovery in the freight economy, and the margins are getting squeezed for all the asset carriers out here. So we wanna give them the tools to dictate specifically what their lane is, how do they want the drivers to drive, a deviation of 30 miles.

With the diesel prices the way it is, they’re eating the fuel costs. They’re not passing that on to the shipper for whom they’re hauling the freight. So we have that precise mile, we have all the data built in properly, and we let our fleets now control how, and dictate to [00:16:30] the drivers how to execute that route, what they’ve contracted on, what they’ve planned on.

So if I’m using PC Miler and it says, “Okay, Joe, from that point A where you picked it up to point B- … is 1,000 miles.” And then I ca- I know I can use, Trimble to say, “Route me to the least expensive route.” Which might be different than PC Miler. How do you get those two numbers to match?

So that’s what we introduced, our batch processing capabilities, which we spoke about. You can compare all the different [00:17:00] settings of PC Miler and say, “Okay, I’m contracting on practical PC Miler route. What if I went the shortest route? How much does it save me in distance? Is it truly fuel cost savings for me?

And am I able to meet my appointment windows and my commitments to deliver the freight in time and fully out there?” So once it, once you’re able to make that comparison, you decide what is the settings that are right for you as a business to operate against those contracted miles. And I guess you could also talk to the customer and say, “Hey, we’re going this route- Yeah

and we’re [00:17:30] gonna save you fuel dollars.” Definitely. And what’s ending up happening with all the uncertainty and all the noise around cargo theft, the customers are coming up and saying, “We want you to follow something prescribed,” or, “We want you to give us awareness as to what you’re doing.” So we’re able to provide that awareness, not only to the carrier who’s hauling the freight, but they could be more than happy to share that with the customers and say, “This is what we’re gonna follow.

This is what you’re, will reduce your fuel surcharge, because we would be incurring less fuel costs- Yeah … but our mileage would be different.” [00:18:00] Yeah. And I saw a, a, a company, and I haven’t talked to them yet, but TGI Connect here. Yeah. And I guess if they’re here, they’re probably a partner. They sure are.

And they are allowing us to track our trailers. And you mentioned the cargo theft and the- Yes … which is just a constant concern now, is if we don’t get our cybersecurity right, we don’t have the s- cargo security right. So because now they’re stealing it by going in our systems and telling drivers to dr- take it to the wrong location.

How do [00:18:30] companies like TGI Connect what’s the partnership value for both Trimble and for them? So traceability at all points is very important. Most of our navigation solutions, the Trimble maps, software, co-pilot running inside the truck, they are more tracking based on the tablet or the device that’s in the truck.

W- the relationship with TGI gives us that low-level visibility. You combine both those pieces of information, and you’re creating true compliance to the route that the carrier decided in the back office, and you [00:19:00] know any deviation. You can set up those alerts inside our co-pilot solution, where any deviation from that route, a half a mile or a mile deviation from a corridor perspective, gets an alert sent out to the dispatcher, to the rep, so that they can act on it immediately- Right

and not realize after the fact that this cargo has moved. We’ve taken for granted for a long time that our trailers were kinda dumb. Yeah. Yes. And so were c- our shipping containers. And I think now we say the [00:19:30] cost of technology has dropped a, a lot, and now I h- we have expectation that we will be able to track via phone, via the t- the tr- tractor, via the trailer, and I think soon we’re seeing more technology go in.

I’ve seen the shipping containers where they have can detect if there’s fentanyl in them. Yeah. Can detect if there’s a human being in there. And I think the expectation now is I want smarter and smarter assets. [00:20:00] And you talked about being on the floor. I was — I just walked the floor before coming here.

The technology, what Fleet Safe brought into the market, and that’s another exciting vendor for you to go and visit, they have tags on the pallets itself, something that Samsara also spoke about. We need that. That becomes more important. You’re not doing just on a trailer basis, you’re not doing on a shipment container basis, you’re doing on the actual shipment basis tracking.

You just slap a tag on it, and it’s got battery life for a year. Just imagine how game-changing that is. We wouldn’t have thought about that [00:20:30] years earlier. The way technology has progressed, that’s brought a very different dimension in the traceability. And when you add all of that, now you can unleash, because all the data exists in an ecosystem, and you can unleash the power of AI on it to say, “Keep…

I don’t need to go and visually track it. I want you to monitor where the freight is. I’ve given you all these data points that are coming in from my providers through a connected system. Alert and take action, which are directed by us.” Yeah. And it only works if [00:21:00] it’s all connected. Yes. Having, I talked to CoreCentric and, Isaac this morning, and we talked about what would your system look like without being connected to Trimble. And it, they’re valuable, but a lot less valuable- Yes … if it’s not connected to this great system that lets you just… and there’s always a new killer app.

Next year if- Sure … w- we’re here, I hope next year to interview you yet again, and there’ll be a whole bunch of new killer apps that we [00:21:30] didn’t envision that are suddenly real. The hallway discussions, the structured and unstructured conversations that we have out here are the ones that drive the innovation.

And yes, we want to be the ones who bring that innovation, but the partner ecosystem that you mentioned is important. We need to connect them. Because Trimble’s not gonna offer everything in the market, right? So let’s have a consumer GPS versus reality, and this is the situation where I used an app that I have on my phone that I’ve allowed me to drive [00:22:00] across the country in my car.

Yeah. But it wedges my truck underneath a bridge or has me hauling hazmat over a, a road that doesn’t allow it. Consumer GPS doesn’t work for trucks. Talk about that. It, it definitely doesn’t, and people underestimate how important it is to accurately navigate a truck. There are so many nuances in it. Just capturing bridge heights is not good enough.

You need to know the turn radius. You need [00:22:30] to know how to get to that location. You might avoid a bridge, but there are alternate paths need to be safe. We’ve seen instances not just for trucks, but even coach buses transporting people who get stuck under a bridge. That’s the last thing that you want. We talked about hazmat that you just brought up.

If you’re taking flammable liquids, and you get caught in any one of the tunnels on the East Coast or across the major east to west corridors, it’s such a hefty fine. It’s not worth sitting with free nav [00:23:00] applications. It’s well worth the investment to avoid having either a trailer stuck under a bridge or getting hazmat tickets- Right

and getting a bad rep. And we’re seeing in the trucking business, and I think it came up in some of the conversations this morning, is safety is starting to, and not just safety and cargo security, cybersecurity, is starting to trump price. I’ve heard recently that a pharmaceutical company was buying three trucks, putting their cargo [00:23:30] in one, and the other two were decoys.

So companies are willing, probably not happily- Spend enough, yeah … to spend extra for security. So we have that expectation, and the idea that you skimped on this and- the hazmat, even when it’s, there’s a rule that we don’t want this hazmat on this road, but if that hazardous material hits the road, God forbid your reputation’s at risk.

XYZ trucking company, no one’s ever heard of you, but they’ve heard of the Fortune 500 [00:24:00] company- … that they were hauling it for. And that’s what we heard even in this morning’s discussion. The liability is not stopping at the carrier anymore. No. Who made the mistake, the driver who decided that they can use a Google Maps application on their phone and navigate using that, that is not gonna get them there.

It propagates all the way to the broker, to the carrier themselves, to the shipper- Yeah … in this case. A few years ago, when I talked to you, you talked about a, a boat, a sh- big ship crashed into a bridge out east. I forgot where. Maryland maybe? The Francis Scott Key [00:24:30] Bridge, yes, which was across the Maryland Harbor.

And that- Baltimore Harbor … and that it was a hazmat bridge. Yes. So if I have Trimble on my tablet, it says, “Okay, here’s the alternative route,” and it makes sure it finds you another hazmat bridge. You need that. Things go wrong, and we provide you those insights, and that is important because that impacted your operations.

That bridge incident impacted the cost of moving hazmat freight across that corridor. All of sudden, something [00:25:00] that would have been a 20-mile journey became 120-mile journey because the tunnels are still hazmat prohibited. They did not get any exemption from the federal government or the Maryland State to haul hazmat loads through those two tunnels that exist.

So they had to go around the City of Baltimore the other way, which increased the mileage because we have to ensure the safety. You just don’t say, “I’m carrying hazmat load and going through the City of Baltimore- … on a 53-foot trailer.” You can also show your customer, “Hey, here’s what happened.

Here’s why I did this.” And [00:25:30] they’re gonna say, “Yeah, you did the right thing.” And that is tying up the full circle the things that we spoke about. I wrote a contract, but reality is different. Ensuring that your route that you save- … ensuring compliance around, around that route, and then telling your customer what needs to be done, why the scenario changed, what caused it to change.

We’re able to provide those insights which help you running your business- … and make sure you’re not running into a loss. Yeah, I gotta tell you a few weeks ago, I was at the Mergers and Acquisition Conference in Naperville, Illinois. It’s [00:26:00] only four and a half hours from my house, and I was using just a, an app on my phone, and it could not get me the last mile to that hotel.

I just kept, it’s a turn, turn left at Eagle, which is, a quarter mile up, and I get there, and it’s like that’s not Eagle. It said turn. I it, I re- I went in circles, and I finally just said I have to stop paying attention to this. And by the way, I didn’t pay for it. There’s no one I can, “Hey, I’m gonna [00:26:30] complain to the-

this mapping company,” that it’s a free app. But I- It’s not their main business. It’s just something they put on their phone. And do I love it? Yeah, I love it until it, it drives me in circles. I don’t have a truck that I’m driving. I’m not on, I’m not on the clock. So just imagine that frustration for a truck driver who’s supposed to deliver that load to the right dock inside- Right

the yard at the right time, and the dock entrance is not on Main Street, but it is on a perpendicular [00:27:00] street half the way down. Yeah. Yeah, and then, y- we judge our trucking partners by their safety, not as much as we should. Yeah. We… By their safety, by their cost, but they’re… On time and in full matters a lot.

And if you said, “Oh, it’s… Y- you don’t understand. I was across the street at your other building.” Yes. And, yeah, call and ask. They’ll tell you I was here. It doesn’t work. And Lobial, and when you talk about [00:27:30] OTF but you brought up the safety component, the study, I think it’s been… It was two years back.

The study illustrated the maximum number of accidents occur in that last few miles, where the driver is not being navigated to the right location with the right guidance. That is where it’s super important. That’s what Trimble Places does. That’s what our co-pilot navigation solution does. We have all that data, not just inside the yard, but how to get you to that truck-specific entrance.

It is difficult for anyone to reverse, make a [00:28:00] U-turn with the equipment that our drivers are hauling. You don’t expect them to pay attention to all the signs on the road. You need to guide them to the right entrance- Yeah … at the right time. Yeah. This reminds me, this discussion reminds me, we have ERPs.

It stands for enterprise resource planning. So at one time, you would have a system or multiple systems. You say, “Yep, I’m calling on Rishi.” He’s the head of purchasing. “I’m calling on him.” And he says yes. And now I go back, and I tell my guys, [00:28:30] “We won the business. Deliver it to Rishi.” Rishi’s in the corporate office 25 miles away from where he wants it, so I need to know where the ma- the location of delivery.

And then also I say okay, invoice Rishi.” Rishi’s not with the invoicing team. No. They’re on the other side of the country. Y- that we end up with resource planning systems that say, “Okay, I have one company that has 35 different records and 10 different addresses, and they all have to be right.” [00:29:00] This is where we oversimplify the trucking business.

I can’t just show up in the front of the building. I have to get to the dock that I’m actually contracted to deliver to. And you take it to the next level when getting to the right dock is so important. When you’re delivering to our grocery stores, the super big chains every single one of them has a separate dock for refrigerated goods and a separate dock for general purpose, and the ways to get to them are never the [00:29:30] same.

You don’t enter the mall or the store location from one path for both of these docks. You have to approach them differently- … in 90% of the cases. So it becomes important with dock level navigation, how do you get to the precise location? Yeah, and if you think, somebody who might be listening say it’s not that hard.

I can tell you when I ran a logistics company, it was a smaller company, but, it was a turnaround. And I remember they would said e- every night the after-hours calls goes to somebody. So they were rotating. And I [00:30:00] said I would like it to ro- I would like to have a week where I do it.”

And everyone’s rolling their eyes like, “Okay.” And you get calls in the middle of the night saying, “I’m here.” Yeah. “I’m here,” and they’re not open. And you’re like, “Where are you at?” “I’m in wherever.” And and I’m like how am I supposed to help? Right now am I supposed to call the office?

They’re not there.” Yeah. That’s right. It’s 2:00 in the morning. You get that all the time. And so I- you have to respect and recognize that the [00:30:30] experience of updating every year, not one year in a row, not two years, not a decade, this is the 40th year in a row you guys have been doing this, and every year it gets better.

And it’s worth it. That’s why you get it. Yeah. Thank you for that, and I think it’s a testament to our ecosystem and the partners also. It’s not just the mapping data. It is how we get that precise information through our partnerships with the facility owners. Yeah. And this th- this problem we’ve been discussing, and this is called the final 500 feet.

Yeah. So the final [00:31:00] mile is the most expensive mile in e-commerce. That’s why we, a lot of companies will say, “We’ll just deliver it to the Postal Service and let them do the final mile.” It’s the most expensive. And I know getting to the right dock, getting to the right location, especially at the, as you mentioned, data centers or construction areas.

I helped a company that did HVAC, but it wasn’t HVACs to distribution centers. It was to skyscrapers all over North America. And [00:31:30] they’re massive facilities, and they, a lot of times they’re new construction, and they have to be sequenced. And sometimes it’s the location is here, but where you deliver is two miles down the road to a staging center.

It’s completely, and we had a similar experience working with the UK high-speed rail project, which Trimble was heavily involved in it, the new high-speed rail. We were delivering different components. Our navigation solution was in use, and you set up temporary roads inside that net- inside that construction site.

We were able to map [00:32:00] all of that on demand for this initiative so that the drivers were routed to the same spot properly to safely deliver all the goods that were needed for the high-speed rail project. And you need somebody who knows the right questions to ask. Yes. Because I guess people can struggle and say, “Oh, we’ll update our system.”

I don’t want you to update it when you get a sec. I need you to do it right now. Right now. Before I need it, ideally. Yes. So a lot of today’s conversation at the conference was about AI, and we talked a little about this Arc [00:32:30] Agent. We have a topic here that’s called mapping as an AI- engine. Yeah. What do you mean by that? People usually think of map data as it’s static, and I just have access to it. You don’t need to do anything with it. I just need to generate a route, and it’s in my head, and I’m gonna follow it. Sure. But the way we know how reality is, there’s so much change that occurs at any point of time, whether it is traffic, whether it is sh- shifting weather patterns, whether it is reaching the d- right dock at the right [00:33:00] time.

What do I anticipate when I get to that location? The drivers’ clocks are always running. A combination of taking all of this data, which is supplementary but very important to the core map and the core route, and processing it to help get the best experience, the safest experience for our drivers to deliver the freight while taking a break.

That is what we were announcing from the Copilot navigation perspective. That’s where our mapping data becoming [00:33:30] intelligent and having AI take the intelligence and deliver a unique solution to the driver or to the back office person is what’s critical. Yep. You heard us talk about drivers do not need to go and tap on the screen to say, “I need to take a break.”

We need to be able to automatically monitor- Oh, that’s that Copilot Driver Assistant … Copilot Driver Assistant. They could just talk to the system and say, “I need a break. I’m gonna run out of hours.” Doesn’t matter even if you’re running out of hours. We need the driver to be focused on the road in front of them.[00:34:00]

If they communicate, “We need a break,” we calculate the closest break to– for them in the preferred network that they have said. We don’t want the driver taking a break at any point. We spoke about cargo theft. We want the right safe location for the driver to take a break so they can rest up, they can get a– grab a bite to eat, and then get back on the road to deliver that freight to the right location at the right time.

Yep. At this conference, we’re also truck parking clubs here. Yes. And so is Project Sixty-One, which is focused on driver health. [00:34:30] And truck parking is a real problem. And, you might find a truck driver who says, “Hey I’m in an area that I’m not familiar with, and I’m running out of hours.

I have to stop, but it’s sketchy.” Yeah. I don’t know the area well enough.” And by the way, this is one of the reasons is we have a s- one of the many reasons we struggle to get women to drive trucks. Sure. Because they’re like, “I’m not gonna s- I’m not gonna just park- Pull over to the side of the road.

Yeah. But I’m telling you, I, I think I would struggle [00:35:00] if I’m in an area that is– I’m unfamiliar with, and I don’t know if the police are gonna stop by. I don’t know if thieves are gonna stop by. Working with Trimble, I can find a motel, I can find a hotel, I can find a place that is friendly to truck drivers.

I got Truck Parking Club helping me find a place to rest. And they’ve been a great partner of ours. We integrated all of their locations to the one-tap reservation system now, one-click reservation system. So when we find the right parking location, if it’s in the Truck Parking Club network, [00:35:30] the drivers can tap on the link to get- That’s nice

parking reserved for them. It’s vetted. It is safe parking. Doesn’t matter the type of driver, doesn’t matter the tenure of the driver, they will be secure and safe in that location. And it’s a great relationship we have, not only just with them, but also the other one that you referenced is Engine, which is the hotel network.

Oh, yeah. They’re a great sponsor. Y- yeah. So you need to take a break. You need, you just, sometimes you need a longer break. You have had a breakdown. Whatever the case might be, the hotel network, which is also [00:36:00] pre-vetted and approved, is very important. And they have a network which is very friendly, and they work with a lot of carriers.

But putting that power in front of the driver, where they can make the choices and they can make the decisions. The number of fleets that still leave it to the driver to find parking is super high, and you don’t want the drivers to have to worry about it. Where do I find parking? What’s gonna happen?

That’s where our partnership becomes very important with Truck Parking Club. Yeah. And we also don’t want our drivers having to pull over. Then that’s when you [00:36:30] stop getting paid. Yes. Yeah. You g- now they’re gonna m- potentially start wasting some time using apps. I don’t want them… it, when you talk about Trimble, one of the nice things about it is it’s pulling my information from system to system.

A few years ago when I was here, I talked to Jack Kenney from Platform Science, and he said something about telematics, and I… he di- he wanted to use a different term. And I said, “Tech stack for drivers.” And he said something like, “Yeah, except I don’t want my drivers doing any inputs.

I want them [00:37:00] doing very minimal inputs. It’s not a good environment for them to do it.” And we have a lot of English as a s- second language people- … in trucks. They’re driving a truck ’cause they don’t wanna sit at a desk and enter in- … information. So let’s not make them do this when they’re looking for a parking spot and potentially running out of hours.

True, and it is a too much stress for them. We do support all the various languages inside Copilot as well. So when you talk to the driver assistant- Nice … it is not just English that you need to talk in. We’re friendly for all, all the drivers out there [00:37:30] who need to communicate and find the right break location, right parking location for their needs.

I remember years ago in that short week that I decided to take the night calls one of the guys c- called, they had a problem. And tr- and he said, I, and I… We were having a hard time on understanding each other, and he said normally I like to just text with-” … the other people who are doing this.”

I said, “So send me texts.” He was Middle Eastern, and I thought to myself, oh boy, this is not easy. He’s somewhere in the middle of the night trying to figure out where to [00:38:00] go. He has to call the after-hours, and now we’re texting- Texting … rather than… And I was like, ugh. Glad, I’m glad we could support it, but, Yeah

better to have a whole ecosystem behind you. Definitely. Yeah, by the way, this is not on the on the list of things we wanna talk about today, but a few years ago when I was here, I talked to one of Trimble’s customers, a trucking company, and they told me the difference between profit and loss in their last year was Trimble mapping.

They said, “‘Cause it’s really [00:38:30] easy to have this margin leak where you said, yeah, you go to point A to point B- … and the driver went just slightly… if you’re 1%, 2% off- That our business will eat up that margin like that. And that is the power that we provide with our compliance capabilities for driving the route, what PC Miler has prescribed, executing it with Copilot.

That prevents the margin leak. That margin leak of deviation of 10 miles- … every single time you run that lane or [00:39:00] taking a toll road versus not taking a toll road- … which was not approved for- … quickly adds up. And you’re aware how sh- small margins these- … assets carriers o- operate on.

Yeah, and I think it was Cindy. I think she’s a Trimble employee now. And I remember her saying, “We route our drivers on cheapest, not shortest, cheapest.” Cheapest. And she says, “Trimble gives us… We wanna go to that gas station.” And so it a- might have added a few miles here, that few miles there, but it was worth it.

[00:39:30] Other times, if I’m winging it, I could have a driver say, “I think this is 10 miles out of my way.” “It’s cheaper gas.” Then he gets there, “Oh, turns out not.” No. And so that’s the power. There are two solutions that we offer in here. We can show you the preferred discounted rates along your route to be able to figure out where you need to fill up.

And also, we have an excellent fuel optimization solution. People think fuel optimization is needed only when the diesel prices are high, but no. You can save on fuel, and a fuel optimized route can result in [00:40:00] significant margin improvements using our expert fuel product. And both of those are options are available, whether you want to just leave it to the driver by giving the visual inside the navigation solution or pre-planning their fuel optimization and dispatching it to them so that Copilot can execute it for them.

Yeah. It’s an interesting thing. Someone was a private equity guy was on my podcast few years ago, and he said, “I see… I think the largest trucking company has 2% of the whole industry,” which is kinda crazy. Yeah. I- [00:40:30] if we had that, we’d have in the automotive space, we’d have, 600 automakers.

Automakers, yeah. And we’d, But he said, “I believe we’re gonna see those, the largest trucking companies gain more.” And when I asked why, he says, “They’re buying better. They buy- they, they get lower it- their cost to capital is less.” He says, “They’re able to go buy 100 trucks at a time or 1,000 trucks at a time.”

So they’re much more efficient when they’re buying. And they’re using tools like Trimble to be [00:41:00] more efficient and more effective, and those nickels and dimes add up to dollars. And in this business, you just can’t afford to be a little off. And by the way, there’s a lot of small companies, they think they’re making money, that they aren’t making money.

And in, in this business that’s very normal. It’s a matter of pennies and nickels and dimes, as you stated. Yeah. It’s our goal to help every size carrier. Doesn’t matter whether you’re the largest one or a five trucking, five truck owner-operator. That’s my point, is are the biggest [00:41:30] companies getting wealthy because, or I shouldn’t say getting wealthy-

doing well- No … because of, because they invested in Trimble, or is the can the small guys get to that size if they make those investments early? I think it is about making those investments early. We’ve seen a lot of new drivers, new fleets coming up and say, “We will bring it. We know how to do this.

It’s easy. How difficult could it be to drive and deliver and go from A to B?” It’s creating that awareness that we need to bring into the market, that there are [00:42:00] these tools, and the tools are not just for larger fleets. We can give it to every size carrier to help them be operating much more efficiently and be profitable.

That will help not just them, but our overall economy. Yeah. And by the way, I think more and more shippers are starting to look and say, “Here’s our expectations. We want this from our carriers.” I don’t want, the our industry the truck drivers, I think a lot of them in the past, maybe even today, say, y- they got this cowboy spirit.

“I’m [00:42:30] gonna go on the open road, and nobody’s my boss.” And I know this feels like we’re trying to rein you in, but reining in makes some bucks, too. Yes. And we heard that in the panel, the leadership panel. Regulation’s important. Shippers are putting some tightening the screws on who drives and who hauls their freight.

It is for the world betterment of everyone. Yeah. I think- All of us are driving down these expressways with our family, and I don’t want someone on the road who doesn’t belong there. And again I think [00:43:00] we’re, as, as we start to automate some of the fleets, I’m starting to talk to people on my podcast about that we have high expectations for them, too.

So it’s it’s a tough industry. E- every time I’m talking to an executive like yourself, it’s like I feel like we go from one problem to another problem. I- it is, and everything brings its own challenges along with its efficiencies. Yep. Rishi, thank you so much for taking the time.

Always happy to spend time with you and look forward to our next meeting as well. Probably next year. [00:43:30] Next year at Insight. Yep. And thank all of you for listening to my podcast. Your support’s very much appreciated. Until next time, onward and upward.