Inside Trimble's Next-Gen Cloud TMS and BTO Solutions | Loaded and Rolling

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

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Thomas Wasson (0:39)

Thomas Wasson, we are at day one, Trimble Insights 2026 Lot of fun stuff to talk about. We're also at the Barkcast booth. We have some friendly pets next to us. If you hear any barking, it means we are Making. impressions, dear friends. But I digress. We're going to have a good conversation in this chat with both George Lutz and Matt Brinkman. They're both with Trimble representing product and engineering. We'll be talking a little bit about their built to order, or call it BTO, so to speak. Getting some more information about that as well as their thoughts about the event. So let's dive right in here. So George, absolute pleasure to be able to chat with you today. As you can tell, we have a nice little ambiance over here. But before we dive in, give me a little bit of back story about yourself.

George Lutz (1:22)

So I've been with Trimble for over 20 years, actually started in 2005

Thomas Wasson (1:28)

You look great by the way. Thank you. For 20 years.

George Lutz (1:30)

I appreciate. It shows a little bit.

Thomas Wasson (1:35)

I know.

George Lutz (1:37)

So I worked in the Trimble Maps division for a while, as the head of engineering there for several years. Well, I actually left Trimble for a year, came back and now I work on the TMS products and the product I'm focused on entirely now is called Trimble TMS, which is a new multi-tenant cloud TMS, order to cash system.

We have a standard tier and a build order tier, and I know you have some questions about that.

Thomas Wasson (2:04)

Well, let's walk through that as well. Tell me about the engineering process behind making a very effective TMS.

George Lutz (2:11)

Yeah. So we started out with a few important goals in mind. Number one, multi-tenant cloud native, fully hosted in Azure, scales in Azure seamlessly, no on-prem components like you'd find in some of the other TMSs. From a usability perspective, we want it to be extremely intuitive, fast to onboard.

The better we're at that, the cheaper we can make the product, the bigger audience we can serve. So those are all of our core tenants. When you see the product and you use it, I think it immediately becomes obvious that the thought that's gone into it, fast, intuitive, easy to use, easy to learn. That's what we've been focused on entirely.

Beyond that, working directly with customers. We've been doing that all year, working with several customers and taking their feedback into the product and prioritizing their work that they give us their guidance, their needs as our roadmap, not just roadmapping in theory on the side alone. So when we go to the next customer, the customer after that, I think all the thought and feedback from previous customers is right there, ready to be taken advantage of.

So with the TMS, the core problem that I see is you can build forever and never have anything for anyone. That's the trick. So you got to start immediately talking to customers and building out for one by one. Eventually, you start to fill in all the boxes, different integrations, different configurations that are required, different ways to do driver payroll and contracts, and mobile common integrations. Eventually, you hit a threshold of capabilities that you can take to a broad swath of customers. We're right at about that point right now. So that's what we want to talk about here, inside this year. We're just about there. We can go broadly attack a large customer base. We're excited about that.

Thomas Wasson (4:39)

Well, that was one of the things I remember last year when you all were talking about trying to transition to like one TMS to rule them all. And beforehand, you had to make custom bespoke things. So each time out, let's say I'm a customer and there's another customer, you'd have to have developers handle each part and build it. Was that one of the big things coming from last year and into this year is building that one modular approach versus this custom bespoke stuff of the past? Give me some historical context.

George Lutz (5:05)

Yeah, so last year at Insight, the Trimble TMS had a much broader goal, which was all of the existing TMS products are going to migrate from, their single tenant instance into the multi-tenant cloud TMS. This year, it's a little more simplified approach where each TMS is going to have their own modernization, and you can get a web front-end experience on top of the existing products. The Trimble TMS is focused on its own independent order to cash system, so totally independent of the other products. We built our own, like I said, cloud-native modern multi-tenant TMS hosted in Azure, and we're looking for different types of customers, mostly small medium-sized businesses right now.