Three business segments multiplied by four key technology areas feels like a recipe for schizophrenic company-wide tech development, doesn’t it? That’s why technology leadership at Oshkosh needs to keep everything on a tight leash.
The only thing Oshkosh products have in common is that they’re trucks, and even that’s ludicrously reductive.
John Deere and Kubota may manufacture diverse ranges of products, but they break down into a few, easy-to-visualize categories. Agricultural fields, golf course greens and suburban lawns feel clearly in the same set, as do construction sites and quarries.
Oshkosh, on the other hand, manufacturers scissor lifts, boom lifts, tow trucks, fire engines, garbage trucks, concrete mixers and airport support vehicles just to name a few; and the Oshkosh Defense segment not only develops a bevy of tactical systems and combat vehicles, it also developed the Next Generation Delivery Vehicles (NGDV) for the U.S. Postal Service.
Jay Iyengar, executive vice president and chief technology and strategic sourcing officer at Oshkosh, cites four main areas of tech development at the company.
- Electrification
- Autonomy and active safety
- Artificial intelligence (at the enterprise and product level, Iyengar notes)
- Intelligent products (think telematics)
Within each of those areas Oshkosh manages tech partnerships and acquisitions, hardware and software development and R&D – all for aftermarket products and vehicles, spread across product lines in the access, vocational and defense industries.
If it sounds like chaos. Iyengar sings a different tune.
Don’t Pigeonhole Tech Leaders
Oshkosh runs cross-segment technology teams for any technology that clearly applies to multiple segments (such as electrification). They report quarterly to the CEO, overseeing development starting at the corporate level, with representatives all the way down to the product level.
“Electrification isn't just about driving the vehicle electrically. All our vehicles are work vehicles. They’re there to do a job, so there are aspects of electrification that happen when you actually operate the vehicles, not just drive the vehicles,” says Iyengar.
“We want to develop scalable technology that’s applicable across all our product families, because it’s always easy to do a one-off. It’s a lot harder to do something at scale.”
Take telematics, as another example. The technology provides vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity, diagnostics, predictive maintenance and fleet management among other benefits, clearly technology with a place across Oshkosh’s entire portfolio.
The exact same telematics hardware that might work fine on luggage tote trucks at airports might not work for a cement mixer. Ruggedness of operating environment, latencies and data rates at the very least differ between deployments.
While they cannot therefore design standardized telematics devices, Iyengar’s team can develop “gray box” back-end software and a common cloud platform onto which partners implement their IP for specific use cases.
The shared platform creates scale. All Oshkosh products, with the exception of defense vehicles, run the telematics system.
Litmus Test: Only Tech that Solves Pain Points
Rather than each cross-segment team assessing external partnerships and acquisitions, since 2019 Oshkosh deploys a centralized corporate venture capital (CVC) team that works across all segments and hunts for companies that augment Oshkosh’s tech portfolio. (Oshkosh also works with other VC firms, Iyengar notes.)
“I think the vision that John [Pfeifer, president and CEO of Oshkosh] created was that the whole notion of us wanting to invent everything ourselves, doing it in a very organic way, is a little old fashioned if you think about where the world is going and [how] the world’s changing. I think we are better off leveraging others. I always joke about how Edison didn’t invent the light bulb. He knew how to commercialize it and make it more practical,” says Iyengar.
The CVC provides half of Oshkosh’s solution to successfully navigating Silicon Valley. In January 2021, Oshkosh acquired the other half, Pratt Miller, an advanced engineering and technology company operating in the motorsports and ground vehicle markets, that reports directly to Iyengar.
“Think of them as a Skunk Works R&D… We leverage the technology that Pratt Miller comes up with across all applications, including inside and outside the company,” says Iyengar.
The Pratt Miller acquisition made clear for Oshkosh the relationship between focused tech development and achieving competitive advantage. Pratt Miller supplies a “super technology chief engineer” to the CVC team to assess every potential technology partnership or acquisition and make sure Oshkosh doesn’t pursue disruptive technology just for its own sake. The technology has to serve a practical pain point reported by customers.
That’s a crucial litmus test for Iyengar and whether she’s willing to invest the company’s time, much less money, in any project or company.
“Any time we develop a technology, there’s actually an application in mind. … You can’t just build a technology that’s cool and expensive. There’s a cost point and the value proposition,” Iyengar explains. “Is the problem statement large enough that somebody would pay for it? … What’s the size of the opportunity we’re going after?”
Take, for example, one of the technologies Oshkosh showcased at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES), a collision-mitigation system with a clear use case for fire trucks.
“The largest risk that they have is not when they’re dealing with the fire. It’s when they’re parked by the side of the road on the highway and dealing with something else,” says Iyengar. But collision mitigation is just as much a problem for any large, lumbering truck that shares the road with consumer vehicles. The technology has both an immediate use case and clear potential for scale.
The Customer Always Knows the Right Tech
To gain competitive advantage with any new technology, companies must recognize when the tech approaches the “slope of enlightenment” phase of the hype cycle, when disillusionment fades and viable use cases develop. Jumping in too early leads to pilot purgatory and missed opportunities while competitors waited to find just the right focus—and just the right acquisition to make the new technology proprietary.
The challenge feels pronounced for Oshkosh, that deals with so many disparate markets and so many different technologies aimed at the specific pain points for each of those markets. Iyengar strictly adheres to the maxim of serving customer needs, to make sure Oshkosh doesn’t waste resources on fruitless technological pursuits.
At CES this year, for example, Oshkosh demonstrated an AI application for garbage trucks a vision system that detects the difference between refuse bins and recycling bins. Mistaking one for the other leads to inefficient sorting and in some cases safety concerns, such as accidentally mixing batteries with regular garbage.
“Every one of our [sanitation] customers are saying this is an issue. … I’m sure they are saying that to all the other supplies, not just us. But we are close to them. We can get ahead. If you wait for them to say, ‘Give me this technology,’ it’s too late,” Iyengar says.
“It’s of paramount importance to understand customers’ spoken and unspoken needs. That’s why I’m a big believer in engineers and product managers actually riding with drivers for a day. … There’s a lot of learning that happens [through that process]. It’s paramount to understand what adds value. If you really solve the right problems, business will come.”
Close Partners Make Willing Test Subjects
A wide customer base from such disparate industries also gives Oshkosh a natural advantage for tech development. The more varied deployments into which a technology tests, the wider the range of feedback. And the larger the customer base, the faster one can generate bulk data.
“Our customers are more than happy to test early prototypes of things. They actually deploy them in their fleets. We get some live feedback on fairly early products as well. It doesn't all have to be fully production ready. They're willing to work with us as our other testing partners. That's a key part of…how we develop and launch scalable technologies across the board.”
And that's how Oshkosh tames the complexity of technology development without anyone losing their minds. Prevent silos, find innovations that reach across the entire company, and remember that the customer is always right.
