Q&A with Kevin Gutteridge, Director of Trimble Luckins
Can you tell us more about yourself and your role?
“In 1988, I joined Luckins as a developer in a newly formed department to look at these exciting things called ‘PCs’. Luckins was already a well-established data provider to the electrical industry and so I joined the business to develop a software offering around the data.
Today, I run Trimble Luckins in the UK.”
How has the industry changed since you started?
“The Luckins that I joined was predominantly a book publishing company that was in the early stages of producing data feeds. Today, we’re a data company that serves MEP wholesalers and contractors with feeds of product and pricing information and we offer manufacturers a valuable route-to-market.
The pace of change around data provision has massively changed over those 36 years; We’ve gone from a weekly printed publication delivered by post, to the Luckins of today which has direct connections plugged into wholesaler ERP systems and a much wider range of contractor software.
Price fluctuations have accelerated massively, and that keeps us very busy because we need to ensure they’re in the various systems before the price effective date, but also the size of the databases has gone up exponentially. What was 20,000 items in 1988 is now over 1.2 million items and it’s our job to ensure that it is accurate and up-to-date for our consumers.”
What’s the biggest challenge facing the electrical industry?
