Trimble's Director of European Strategy, Klaus Kremer, met with our partners, HERE Technologies to discuss the state of the current market and how our collaboration resolves these challenges.
Edited transcript for readability
What challenges is the global transport and logistics industry facing in 2023?
For our customers, the transportation companies, it's really one sentence; do more, with less, in a smarter way.
[For transportation companies] their customers, the load recipients, are more demanding, resources are getting tight, driver shortages and costs are always increasing - like we all experience in our daily lives. Fleet owners realize that they need good solutions and technology for smarter planning and increased flexibility during planning and execution.
How does this translate to your business at Trimble?
At Trimble Maps, we provide a map-centric development platform for routing, scheduling,
mapping and navigation.
We focus on three areas; The first one is reliability. [Every] route we calculate is always optimized for the vehicle type which is specified. [This means that] a route for a small delivery vehicle is [going to be] different than a [route for a] 40-tonne truck. The routes are legally compliant for the vehicle, they are [designed to be] safe for the drivers and they are efficient.
The second is consistency and precision. It starts with a calculated drive time for a specified route, again for the [specific] vehicle type, but then [our software] takes into consideration historic traffic patterns, live traffic during execution, hours of service, break times [that the] drivers are legally obliged to take, as well as dwell time at stops. We take the drive time and all the other factors into consideration to calculate a true precise ETA - the estimated time of arrival.
And [the] third is visibility. The vehicles operate in a highly dynamic world. The dispatchers [that are] managing the fleets as well as the load recipients need to understand if [the road] conditions are changing - If something is delayed or even early. Within our platform, we enable exactly that type of functionality.
How does the HERE platform enable you to develop solutions?
We provide for our global customers, for customers around the world, a map-centric development platform where the map and the map data [are] core to the functionality. We use the HERE data* for its quality, as well as its global reach, which gives us a perfect foundation to provide our solutions wherever our customers operate.
*In North America we build our commercial map data, with the help of our GIS team, engineers and cartographers who spend each day conflating sources and continuously updating the map data
To learn more, visit maps.trimble.com