It was a nurture over nature startup, born out of a commitment to innovation. For the son of a construction company owner and daughter of a car dealership entrepreneur, it wasn’t a big leap to think that Trent and Kimberly Robinett might start their own company someday.
They met at the University of Missouri - Kansas City in the 90s while he was studying civil engineering and she studied electrical engineering. After working at a couple of engineering consulting firms and the Missouri Department of Transportation, Trent shared some of the struggles with finding qualified Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) firms to satisfy project requirements. Kimberly saw the need for a firm that kept up with the latest advancements in engineering technology, and floated the idea of starting their own company.
Nurture won, and TREKK Design Group LLC was also born
“Kim said, ‘I think I could do that’,” stated Trent, and in 2002 they founded their own engineering services firm. Just as they came to that decision, nature almost overcame nurture. Kimberly was expecting twin girls. Trent told her, “Well I guess we’ll have to put it off,” and Kimberly responded with “Hell no! We’re going to do this!” Nurture won, and TREKK Design Group LLC was also born that year.
Established as a certified Woman-owned DBE, TREKK was able to fast-track access to state engineering services contracts, and today operates from 11 offices in Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, Arkansas and Tennessee, employing 227 professionals on public and private sector transportation, surveying and municipal water engineering projects.
TREKK has won multiple “Champions of Business” and “Best Places to Work” honors from the Kansas City Business Journal and St. Louis Business Journal, and a 2024 “Business Excellence Award – Innovation” from the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce. According to Trent, who spends a large part of his day mentoring employees and minding an award-winning corporate culture, a big part of TREKK’s success is the company’s ability to adapt and change and integrate change to meet new needs.
A testament to this ability is the chamber of commerce innovation award that recognized TREKK’s patented PreView underground storm and sanitary sewer pipe viewing technology. PreView combines high tech cameras with TREKK’s equally innovative AI-driven Waterspout data collection and delivery system. Trent says the system was conceived after “a young engineer in the company threw a deer camera down a sewer pipe to see what was going on, and it grew from there.”
TREKK PreView gives clients a better understanding of the condition of their systems, helps them prioritize improvements, and then design practical solutions that respect budgetary constraints. Benefits include the ability to proactively find and fix issues in municipal wastewater systems while saving time and money to investigate gnarly underground problems in real-time from the safety of data monitoring screens. In addition, PreView can help cities avoid sewer backups, wastewater overflows and other costly underground breakages that may interrupt essential services.
If there’s an anomaly, machine learning algorithms will spot it use the underground image data to trigger an alert for operators
While many people understand Artificial Intelligence as the realm of magical tools that mimic human intelligence to create essays, music, images and even movie clips based on a few simple text prompts, TREKK’s technology relies on a branch of AI called machine learning (ML). ML learns how to perform a specific task better over time based on the accurate identification of data patterns. For example, TREKK can train its cameras on an underground site, monitor for overflows and, if there’s an anomaly, machine learning algorithms will spot it use the underground image data to trigger an alert for operators, who can easily scroll through thousands of images taken over a series of time to determine the root cause of the issue.
TREKK has a team of machine learning experts in its ranks, but made the decision to seek out a best-of-breed machine learning software vendor with demonstrated success in wastewater systems. That led the team to infinitii ai.
TREKK made the decision to seek out a best-of-breed machine learning software vendor with demonstrated success in wastewater systems
Trent said that some TREKK employees were already familiar with infinitii flowworks from previous jobs. The software has earned a decade of loyalty in over 70 large cities and municipal districts across North America. It’s renowned for its ability to easily accept varying internal and public data inputs and outputs, from underground camera images tied to sensor data, to satellite weather data inputs from far overhead. infinitii ai also launched a new line of machine learning software in 2022 as it continues to evolve with the needs of modern water utilities commonly equipped with wireless sensors and multiple data sources.
“We are capable of writing our own code,” said Trent, “But we realized that the backbone of our Waterspout system needed an overhaul. And at the same time we reached the conclusion that we really had to get out of the software business to focus on what we do best.”
After a successful project completed this Spring to integrate infinitii flowworks with TREKK PreView, “Waterspout powered by infinitii ai” has been rolled out to 11 TREKK clients that include municipalities and even other engineering services companies. “We’re getting great feedback,” stated Trent, “and are very pleased to see infinitii ai quickly responding to client input from the field.”
“Waterspout powered by infinitii ai” has been rolled out to 11 TREKK clients that include municipalities and even other engineering services companies
Trent says infinitii flowworks and its support team excels in the unique world of municipal water systems where no operating environment is alike. “Inevitably, each client instance has its own engineering context and data types. infinitii flowworks is built with that in mind. It’s not a one-size-fits all, and their development team is nimble enough to work with us to solve unique problems as they come up. Like us, they’re driven by continuous improvement and want to push to the next level. That’s the key to success with our partnership.”
“We want infinitii ai’s software to be a water utilities standard as much as they do,” continues Trent. “PreView gives our clients the ability to see what’s happening inside their systems as it happens, and some weird things can and do happen down there.”
“With machine learning capability, it’s no longer ‘out of site out of mind’,” he continues. “We can pinpoint and avoid problems without the need to send crews into sometimes dangerous environments. This new way of doing things completely replaces the old way of delivering a PDF report of a site inspection that might have been done a month ago and isn’t relevant anymore. We’re excited by the ability to help clients operate based on live data that can include predictive analytics – what could happen versus what did happen.”
While TREKK does a lot of work with large municipal clients in Kansas City, Saint Louis and Omaha, Trent stated he wants the TREKK team to take what it’s learned there and scale it so that any sized community can benefit from “Waterspout powered by infinitii ai” data fed by the PreView remote underground camera system.
It doesn’t matter how big or small the city is, they can all benefit from the marriage of real-time data and remote underground visual confirmation
“It doesn’t matter how big or small the city is,” he said. “They’re all dealing with the same pipe maintenance issues and financial constraints, so they can all benefit from the marriage of real-time data and remote underground visual confirmation.”
Speaking of marriage, Trent and Kimberly’s daughters, who now have a younger sister, are now the same age as their parents’ award-winning 22-year-old company, studying mechanical engineering and data science respectively. Trent admits that the discussion of corporate succession has come up at the dinner table.
“When we asked one of our daughters if she might want to take over, she came back with ‘Well Dad, I think I’d rather compete with you,’” he laughs. “Without blinking, I said competition is good, and that we promise to help make that happen!”
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