IntelliShift CEO John Cunningham and VP of Marketing John Carione kick off IntelliShift’s ConnectedOps Virtual Event with an overview of what to expect during each session as well as a brief history of the company and a market overview and outlook.
Below is the transcript of this session. You can also watch the session and view all sessions from ConnectedOps 2020.
Full Transcript: ConnectedOps Event & Market Future Overview
John Carione: Let me be the first to welcome you to the ConnectedOps 2020 where we will be discussing the future of field and asset operations. We’re so glad you decided to join us today, and I’m excited to kick off what we hope will become a recurring event that brings the entire IntelliShift community together every year. I’m John Carione, Vice President of Marketing here at IntelliShift. While I’ve only been here a short time, I’ve been amazed at the passion and innovation I’ve been hearing from you, our vibrant community of customers and partners. I’ve had the pleasure to speak to a number of you to learn how you are putting your customers’ experience at the center of what you do every day. You’re doing this by connecting people, processes, vehicles, and equipment to deliver actionable insights across your operations, and there has been one main theme regardless of your role, size of company, or even your specific industry: you’re all taking the initiative to break down silos of information and siloed processes inside your organization by unifying data, offering visibility across teams, and empowering your operations managers to take action themselves and solve daily challenges.
There are two short topics I’ve got this morning before I hand it off to John Cunningham, our CEO and Founder of IntelliShift. The first is to take you through an overview of our virtual event to maximize your time invested today. This will ensure you are taking away real actionable knowledge and best practices back to your organization this week to begin improving processes and providing real-time data visibility for your teams.
So, let’s talk more specifically about what you can expect today. Well, for one, you’ll stay informed on the key trends happening in our market; you’ll learn best practices for your specific role in industry; and, you’ll also be hearing directly from your peers, our valued customers, who will be outlining their success stories with the IntelliShift platform; and finally, our product teams will be diving deep into our fall line-up of new products.
We have a broad set of industries represented daily in our customer base and here at ConnectedOps 2020. You represent more than 10 different industries spanning from construction and utilities to field service, food and beverage, education, delivery logistics, and more. This chart represents a highly diverse group of industry leaders that will be sharing their insights on how they’re driving digital transformation from the ground up and delivering a differentiated customer experience out to their constituents.
You’ll have a broad array of resources and experts standing by to help you reach your conference goals. We’ve got a packed agenda of keynotes and breakouts that I’ll review in a moment, but there’s so much more. We have a virtual tradeshow environment where you can view videos and other content staffed by live product experts ready to answer your questions. You’ll also have access to tech support, both for the virtual event itself, and to chat with our IntelliShift product leaders, and then you can always take a trip inside our ConnectedOps Lounge for additional links to social media and other technical documentation sites to review our new products. You can also network with each of your peers and chat live with others in your particular role or industry.
Here is a high-level view of today’s agenda with some of the breaks built in throughout the day. During the first set of keynotes happening this morning, you’ll hear from John Cunningham, our CEO, followed by Kristi Faltorusso on customer success strategy, and finally, from our Connected Customer Keynote, Jake Rubin, who is VP of Operational Excellence at Sweeping Corp of America. The next set of breakouts are for the product and best practices sessions. These are deep dives which offer you the opportunity to choose which topics fit best for you and your role and your current set of challenges. We even have a session designed for anyone new to the IntelliShift platform. During the last set of breakouts, you’ll be able to hear from one of our two partner speakers who will highlight their complementary offerings. And, we will end the day with a great panel of customers focused on getting the most out of your data, followed by our capstone keynote on IntelliShift’s Strategy and Roadmap with our CEO, Ryan Wilkinson. He is also discussing some sneak peeks into the future of the platform, so you won’t want to miss that. And then, we’ll close with remarks from our President, Doug Eden, highlighting the company’s road ahead.
A really big shout out to all of our customer speakers today, including Sweeping Corp of America, Liberty Coca Cola, Paraco Gas, Northwell Health, and Bimbo Bakeries. And, a big thanks to our valued partners at Route4Me and Snowflake.
Please don’t forget to join us on social media throughout the day. Tweet and post with the hashtag #ConnectedOps2020 to join in with your thoughts and perspective on the day.
Next, I want to frame the rapidly emerging and fast-growing world of connected and field operations, and discuss what we’ve been seeing in the market in 2020 and beyond. Gartner Research forecasts our market will grow over 20% in the next few years, driven mostly by the need to leverage a growing amount of field, fleet, and asset data. I think if you take one thing away from my session, it’s that now is the time to act. While the market has traditionally been focused on fleet management and telematics, which are still important elements of our IntelliShift platform, to succeed in 2021 and beyond, you’ll need to dig even deeper into trend analysis and data analytics to stay competitive in your industry. If you’re not moving your organization forward now to capture hidden business opportunities in your data, it’ll be even harder to make that leap a few years from now. So, let’s start the journey together as a community together at ConnectedOps 2020.
Gartner has also recently been evolving their own viewpoint on how new technology advancements are impacting the market, and our vision is very consistent with theirs, as highlighted in this chart from their market guide, and they’ve been taking note of what IntelliShift is doing to lead and innovate. We’ve recently been invited to participate in the 2020 Gartner Market Guide for Transportation Mobility to be released early next year. The guide will dive deep into many of these new high value capabilities such as analytics, integration, visibility, and mobility.
Aside from technology advancements, there are also market trends at play as well. For instance, safety and privacy risk can limit options of these new tools, so it is imperative that we are investing in these areas to ensure that you maximize the use of the platform. I mentioned artificial intelligence previously as a key driver to be more proactive in your approach to optimizing processes. Of course, COVID-19 has impacted so many markets this year, and ours is no exception. As organizations are forced to pivot to ensure there’s more digitization of processes and minimize unnecessary face-to-face interactions. And, finally, government regulations continue to drive the need to maintain your compliance posture as they are often updated regularly to meet public policy requirements.
The downside of these market forces and technology advancements is that they sometimes, unintentionally, create additional silos inside departments and functions. That’s because individual teams and functions try to implement their own solutions or processes, but they are often disconnected from the rest of the organization. This leads to poor overall limited integration across systems and reduced visibility in the insights that you’re able to share across teams. On the flip side, IntelliShift’s core strategy is to help you connect these siloed operations that allow you to exceed your personal and team KPIs by connecting these siloed operations. As you can see, many of you started solving singular challenges in each of your departments, and make no mistake, that’s powerful on its own for your team, but what’s even more powerful is what comes next. What happens when you connect across functions with a single pane of glass? Well, you get more uniform analysis so that reporting is more consistent. For instance, driving habits on vehicles requiring more frequent brake and tire maintenance could reveal that drivers frequently experiencing safety instances like speeding or hard braking, might not only increase the risk of collision, but ongoing maintenance cost as well. For safety and compliance departments, you could reduce paper through the introduction of digital vehicle and asset inspections. Automating this data flow can reduce hours spent aligning payroll or verifying delivery or even service events. And, how about connecting to the finance department in the back office? Paper time sheets, routes, and load summaries take time to generate, and are susceptible to damage or loss. Finance could reduce paper timesheet dependency by integrating driver hours of service data into their payment system, or connect delivery schedules to automate billing through their ERP system.
So, as you move throughout today’s sessions, start to think about siloed operations in your business, and what opportunities you have to shepherd your organization to higher value, more mission-critical solution suites. So, as you navigate our sessions today, looking for better ways to optimize business outcomes, you’ll see these three core themes again and again: digitize, predict, and connect. This is the foundation for everything we’re building here at IntelliShift. First, digitization allows you to evolve your organization from paper and Excel-based processes to a single pane of glass using simple business logic to automate work flows and present data anytime, anywhere on mobile devices. Next, you need to connect both internally across systems and siloed processes, and externally with core systems of record and empower your teams with all of the information they need to make informed decisions. And, finally, to use data to help predict and proactively optimize future routes, schedules, and other safety and maintenance events.
I wanted to leave you this morning with a vision for the future. To execute on this vision and win in this market, you’ll need to partner with those who enable you to deliver iterative, configurative solutions that are rich with all the data you need. Only then can you optimize business outcomes from a variety of mission-critical use cases that span across roles, functions, teams, and processes, with data that is resident both inside and outside of your organization. We sincerely hope you’ll continue to partner with us at IntelliShift to make this vision a reality at your organization. Thank you for your time, and with that, I’d like to introduce John Cunningham, CEO and Founder of IntelliShift.
John Cunningham: Hello, I’m John Cunningham, CEO and Founder of IntelliShift. I wanted to personally welcome you to our first ever IntelliShift ConnectedOps 2020 Virtual Conference, which I hope will become an annual event for us. Our entire company and community are incredibly excited for this opportunity to bring us all together with you, our fantastic customers. And today, for those of you who are watching, who are not yet our customers, we hope today’s event will help you learn and grow in your own career, connecting your field asset operations across people, data, and processes is the most direct way to drive optimized outcomes for you, your teams, and your business. My wife Karen and I founded our company almost 20 years ago, yet today, we’re more excited about the future than ever as we embark on our next big stage of growth as IntelliShift, a division of VTS. My favorite thing about my job is listening and learning from our customers; your stories of innovation, success, and creativity as you drive your real operational change inside your organizations. I hope that over the next several hours, you too will be inspired by hearing these stories from your peers, listening to our best practices, and interacting with our product experts. We’ll outline the future of our platform and connected operations.
As we get started, I wanted to briefly share with you the history of IntelliShift, share some of the trends we’re seeing transform our industry, and highlight some of our exciting product announcements. You’ll want to stay tuned to hear more about this from my team.
Let’s look back on the incredible history of our company. Our view has always been anchored by our belief that the end-to-end customer experience must be paramount to everything we do. From day one, our success has been tied directly to your success, and we are proud of the fact that we genuinely care deeply that as a true customer-first organization, we know the customer experience starts with your first interaction, sometimes long before you’re even a customer with us, and not just when you sign on as a customer. At IntelliShift, that milestone is just the beginning of what we believe will be a long and wonderful experience.
We started the company well before the cloud in 2002, and we are a reseller of a few brands of telematics products, but neither of them had the feature set or detailed maps, as well as ease of use, that our clients deserved. So, in 2004, we launched our first product: FleetMinder, a client server-based model, and real-time GPS fleet management system. Then, shortly after, in 2008, we launched Silent Passenger, our first cloud-based solution, enabling our customers to view their fleet in a user-friendly application while pioneering an integrated two-way messaging and routing solution. That’s when we began to understand, we needed to help customers connect siloed processes with automation. Over time, we were amazed at how many of you began to leverage data and scale processes to grow your organizations. We knew that we were onto something special. We have always been innovators: we were the first to offer real-time speed data, and we have engineered some innovative solutions over the years for our clients, such as dual-zone cargo temperature modeling, engine diagnostics, vehicle sensor monitoring, and different technologies to help advance our customers’ efforts. In 2012, we released our first mobile application and continued to focus on customer success, scalability, and data visibility. We can service tollable assets, vehicles, trucks, boats, and our platform has been designed from the ground up to service mixed-use fleets. The last couple of years, we’ve seen tremendous growth, thanks to all of you, and that has allowed us, and reinforced to us, the importance of accelerating our investment and new features that help you integrate with other systems, improve security, and make administration easier to help you scale your operations. We are an ELB-compliance provider and have pioneered custom solutions like HID, driver ID swipe cards, for customers that require a higher level of security and access control. To this end, we have developed, along with our partners, a fortified enterprise-grade solution available to both existing and new customers. The solution embeds a rugged, credential reader in fleet applications which supports a client’s current RFID credentials that are already being used to access the company’s facilities, and integrates that credential data with our existing IOT gateway. When a driver uses an existing badge, ID card, or key fob, they’ll log into the vehicle, and the system obtains a code, each ID or other credential, to connect all access points for a true enterprise-grade security solution. Finally, earlier this year, we launched IntelliShift, our next generation asset and fleet intelligence platform, our single glass pane approach to help unify fleet and asset operational data while reducing the number of separate applications you rely on. Now, as we continue our journey together, our focus remains consistent and clear. First, to help improve safety and compliance; secondly to drive efficiencies that reduce total cost of maintenance, fuel spend; and finally, to improve your resource utilization rates and drive the profitability of your business.
We never forget though, it’s you, our customer, that makes this all possible. Our thousands of customers form a vibrant community of innovators and operational problem solvers, and the growth of the end-user base has been impressively growing to over 100,000 users today. In the beginning, many of you started with us by solving a singular challenge, whether it be in safety or maintenance or asset tracking, but today, with our expanded and additional modules in the platform, we now work with you to solve more mission-critical, connected, operational challenges, and to drive real ROI.
The next topic I want to discuss, the big trends I’m seeing, signal a massive shift in how organizations drive digital transformation from the ground up. First, is the empowerment to get work done in new ways, powered by people like you, who solve their own challenges and push forward the digitized, paper-based processes. Regardless of what type of operations role you’re in, you are clearly someone resourceful who sees problems and wants to fix them. Since our platform offers operations the ease of use to customize the last mile of the solution on your own, digital transformation can happen from the ground up, starting with you. Second is the need for more connection, automation and integration across your technology ecosystem. Organizations like yours are choosing to disrupt the status quo by uniting people, processes, and data to transform daily operations, repowering in the moment insights, you are revolutionizing change required to breakdown silos and provide complete visibility across the organization, becoming empowered to solve high order problems, integrations to ERP systems, or being agile and flexible to iterate on processes where the requirements of your daily business need change.
Finally, the trend around data intelligence, these new smart systems that can leverage AI and machine learning help predict where there are proactive opportunities to reduce the number of safety incidents, reduce maintenance costs, and positively affect the bottom line. This trend is real and is becoming faster than you might think to our industry, which has traditionally been more reactive to data.
Now, let’s get ready to meet some of my team and hear from them directly. We’ve got our product manager, and other leaders, chomping at the bit to discuss three incredibly exciting new products later today. So, let me offer a preview. First, there’s the latest enhancement in our version of our Inspect product. Inspect launched earlier this year to help digitize paper-based inspections and bring them online. There a host of great new features in this release, including notifications for operators when an inspection fails with an out-of-service stages added to the inspections to better track failed inspections, and an operator verification signature. Second, we have announced the availability of IntelliShift Operations IQ, our new analytics offering, that allows you to understand your data at a very fine grain. It helps to break down traditionally siloed processes that affect other areas of your business to make better, more informed decisions. Of course, we’ll also be discussing our newest product release, IntelliShift Video AI, when paired with our video telematics solution, offers the ability to predict high-risk situations for your drivers even before they happen so you can take appropriate action. And last, but certainly not least, I’d like to tease out some of the great new product innovations you’ll hear about from my team. I’d like to personally invite you to stick around until the end of today’s event to hear directly from our CTO, Ryan Wilkinson, as he delivers his future of IntelliShift keynote and dives deep into the strategic roadmap to offer us a sneak peek into the future of connected operations at IntelliShift. So, please attend our product breakouts, as well as Ryan’s product keynote later today, to learn much more.
In closing, it is our goal every day to optimize your customer experience and to partner and to learn from you. We believe this is the best way to ensure we are helping you connect data, drive insights for your operational excellence, and optimize your business outcomes. I truly hope you gain and expand your knowledge today at ConnectedOps 2020, and I look forward to speaking with you again soon. Enjoy the conference and thank you for attending.
John Carione: Thanks John, that was great. Next up, we are kicking off our customer-focused sessions led by Kristi Faltorusso, our VP of Customer Success.