Vendor Pitch Winners 2021
Date: 07-Oct-2021
Each year at the qldwater Annual Forum, we host a Vendor Pitch session to raise funds for the Queensland Water Regional Communities Innovations Program (QWRCIP) which allows approved scholarship holders to spend time visiting SEQ service providers and attend the Annual Forum.
We caught up with Michael Krome from Trimble and Brad Dalton from SmartTech, whose combined presentation was selected as the winner of the 2021 Vendor Pitch session, to see what the win means for them and for their companies.
Can you please tell us about your decision to enter the pitch and your subsequent win – what does it mean for Trimble & SmartTech?
For over 40 years, Trimble has been creating unique solutions that help customers to improve their productivity, quality, safety, compliance and sustainability. Our focus has grown from pioneering Global Positioning Systems (GPS) technology, to connecting the physical and digital worlds across the whole Asset Lifecycle. The water industry has often seen Trimble products in the Design & Construction phase of their assets lifecycle and we now want to share our Operational, Maintenance and Monitoring solutions with the Australian water community.
Working with our distribution partner SmartTech Australia, we saw the Qld Water Directorate Annual Forum Vendor Pitch as a fantastic opportunity to share some high level knowledge about our Cityworks Asset Management and Trimble Water Asset Monitoring technologies, and showcase how SmartTech Australia are putting our technology to good use with utilities around Australia.
What are you / your organisations trying to achieve within the urban water and sewerage sector and what excites you?
At Trimble, the context of asset location and its attributes is in our DNA, being a pioneer of satellite positioning (GPS) technology. Combine that with our vision to “connect the physical and digital worlds to help solve complex problems”, we are excited to bring new products to the market which achieve two goals:-
- Unlock Asset Data - Utilise the many known attributes of our assets including location, class / type, size and its operating status to make more informed decisions. By leveraging the assets locations and relationships to each other through Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology, unlocks near real time conditional hotspots, asset operating state and predict failures which are often missed when looking at a tabular list or textual report from traditional systems.
- System of Action - Providing an End to End solution, which allows asset monitoring data to seamlessly inform the operational teams of issues and automatically generate Service Requests and Work Orders to resolve problems before they become major issues such as customer outages, environmental breaches and loss of revenue product.
Distribution partners like SmartTech Australia, work closely with our clients to listen to their challenges and advise on and deliver smart solutions to solve these pain points.
What do you think about the current technologies available now and what it means for the water industry?
There are some fantastic technologies being deployed in the Australian Water Industry, however the large majority don’t value the data that is generated from the technology in the context of sharing across enterprise wide systems, which results in “Data Silos” being created. Trimble’s focus is not just on producing high quality hardware and software technology, our vision is to “connect the physical and digital worlds to help solve complex problems” by enabling data workflows throughout an organisations corporate systems. By breaking down the silos of data, it allows water operators and asset managers the ability to see the full picture of their operating assets, allowing them to make informed data driven decisions through our System of Action.
Is there anything exciting in the pipeline that you are looking at bringing to the market?
Trimble invests approx. 14% of our revenue back into product Research and Development, so there are always new innovations coming through the pipeline. Currently there are exciting innovations in the works that seek to build upon the Trimble Telog telemetry hardware and Trimble Unity software combining seamless integration with our Cityworks Asset Management and Permitting technology. This gives organisations in the Water Industry that ability to share asset monitoring information with works management and asset managers in real-time.
A growing trend is for larger utilities in Australia to centralise their asset performance and operations data in Data Lakes. Our Trimble software has out of the box integration solutions (API’s, WebHooks, etc) to deliver this data in realtime to a client’s Data Lake.
Through our vendor partnerships and by supporting our local distribution partner’s innovations, we aim to break down data silos by integrating asset monitoring data with enterprise systems within the Trimble family as well as 3rd parties including GIS, Asset Management, SCADA and Operational resourcing to allow utilities to make more informed, situational aware decisions, in real-time.
Product details:
Trimble Water and Remote Monitoring
Cityworks (read more in this blog post)
System of Action customer story
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