Trimble likes to say that it transforms the way industries work. And for good reason. With more than 2,000 issued patents for advances in technology, the cutting-edge, multi-national company builds core innovations in connectivity, modeling, and data analytics for customers in agriculture, construction, and transportation. 
 
Domo recently sat down with Ron Kost, Trimble’s director of business intelligence (BI), to better understand his company’s journey with Domo Everywhere, the embedded analytics tool that helps organizations quickly and easily share data with partners and automate routine tasks.  
 
In his two decades with Trimble, Kost has played a key role in the business’ digital transformation. In this interview, he shares his insights about building next-generation data processes that are transforming industrial technology for customers. 
 
Q: What is Trimble’s background with BI solutions and using data to support its decision-making? 
 
A: Trimble, as a whole, serves a variety of industries. Right now, I’m focused on the transportation industry, where we provide end-to-end solutions in all areas, including transportation management, maintenance, routing and optimization, mobility and telematics, tracking and visibility, and safety and compliance. From an information standpoint, it’s a very complex industry.  
 
What we found with the Domo platform was a method to utilize our centralized data store, bring all of these complex solutions and data points together, and provide our customers with a single source of truth within the platform.  
 
Q: What were you looking for when you began searching for a partner to help address your data needs? 
 
A: Our original thoughts were to find something that would be an easy lift-and-shift, and not too labor-intensive as far as deployment. We wanted something cloud-based that provided us a solution from data visualization all the way to the back end with data processing, if we needed.  
 
And we wanted to bring our own data engineering group. We have a very talented team here that’s doing a lot of good work to build a centralized enterprise data warehouse.  
 
We also wanted to use our data partner on top of our structured data system and build a process that makes it easy to manage that data and deploy it to customers.  
 
Q: How did you find the process of bringing your team together with the Domo team to implement Domo Everywhere? 
 
A: It’s been good! We started in July 2020, and I think there have been surprises on both sides—as there would be with any project of this scale. Domo is very responsive, and that’s been a nice part of this project, too. You have a trusted support system that’s listening to our unique situation. They are able to react and come with timely solutions to get the platform scaled the way we need. 
 
Q: What was your initial use case? 
 
A: We first introduced Domo for our platform called Reveal Business Intelligence. It ties together data for self-serve transportation reporting capabilities on top of our enterprise data warehouse. This was the big centralized component that we needed, and we will add branches of work that are more focused on embedding Domo into our products.  
 
Q: How is Domo Everywhere benefitting your customers? 
 
A: We are delivering a structured, transportation-based data platform with packaged dashboards and visualizations, which in turn helps shift the time to value for our customers by an estimated 90% out the gate. Our customers no longer need to focus as heavily on the upfront data architecture, validation, and analysis, and can go live with a full end-to-end BI solution within a couple weeks. 
 
Q: How has Domo Everywhere helped improve your business results? 
 
A: Having the capability to fit all of our data content together in one cloud solution has given us a pretty significant bottom-line increase as far as time to market for the product. We have reduced 40% of our time and dev spend on our plan to move our analytics product to the cloud and get a solution to customers.

Domo Everywhere has provided Trimble with a faster time to market and a much improved delivery timeline for our users, which in turn has provided a win-win for both Trimble and our customers. 
 
Q: Where do you still have challenges, and how is Domo Everywhere helping to solve them? 
 
A: We have customers that are still using paper-based systems and spreadsheets and aren’t hiring analysts, so they want our products to give them everything they need right out of the box. Then we have customers who employ an IT staff of 150 with data scientists that want to consume our data for their own needs.  
 
So, it’s a broad spectrum, and we are trying to find that sweet spot for how we support each use case. But the majority of our customers want more than just the data served to them. They want a user interface and platform that helps them manage their data and get some out-of-the-box transportation solutions and KPIs. This is what Trimble and Domo are providing to our customers.