A culture of growth and continuous development

ISJ speaks exclusively with Mike Rimmington, Senior Vice President and Head of Key and Asset Management, Traka ASSA ABLOY.

Can you tell us about your journey in security and what your role is?

I actually trained as an accountant and I previously worked for IT services and telecoms businesses, which were either privately owned or equity owned.

Recently, however, I worked at a security company called Biosite, a workforce management and access control solutions provider for the construction industry. I worked there for about a year before it was acquired in 2020 by ASSA ABLOY.

After working as Biosite’s CFO for the construction vertical, I took over as Head of the Business there before joining Traka in July 2023 (known internally at ASSA ABLOY as the Key Asset Management division).

My new role is global facing, so I look after our businesses in over 40 countries around the world.

My role is split into different parts. I’m the day to day global head of Traka business areas, including the KEYper business, which was acquired by Traka in 2019.

Within that, my role is focused on oversight, business strategy, working with the different regional teams to navigate and assist at the best ways to help drive the business forward.

In my role, I’m not hugely operational. If you look at how Traka USA is led, you can see how we define a clear business model that is replicated around the world. In the UK, we have a Head of Europe who reports to me.

The other core areas we have here in the UK are related to product management and R&D functions – for example, all of the Traka product line that we have is generally produced here in region and is then used to service our end users around the globe.

KEYper also has a manufacturing facility in the US, which is part of our expanding global manufacturing strategy.

The second part is related to my role on the Executive Management Team for ASSA ABLOY Global Solutions. Representing one of the six divisions within ASSA ABLOY Global Solutions, I help support the wider corporate strategy.

Can you tell us more about your leadership philosophy, what drives you and how you approach your current role?

My philosophy is that I’m here to enable people to do what they can do best. I view my role as making sure that we are consistently aligning ourselves in a sensible way, enabling people to do the job they are here for whilst removing any barriers that may prevent them being able to do that.

Part of this is setting the overall strategy for people to be able to work towards; being able to articulate this to people whilst ensuring that we are all rowing in the same direction.

When it comes to style, I think I’m fairly informal and I like to be collaborative. I do like to get things done quite quickly and sometimes I think it is just better to make decisions, give things a try and accept that we may not always get everything right, but we can make effective progress.

Ultimately, I am very keen on empowering people.

One of the things that I get personal satisfaction from in my role is helping to create an organisation where people can have interesting and fulfilling careers, creating a business they can grow and develop with.

How do your leadership philosophies align with Traka’s values?

We have got some really talented people at Traka who are incredibly passionate – the team really wants to do what’s best for not only Traka, but for ASSA ABLOY.

We’ve got a highly engaged workforce with creative ideas. Because we are a technical business, we also have a very well developed R&D team and product management team.

Like anybody who is new to an organisation or role will tell you, it always takes a little bit of time to adapt, but I think my approach to empowering people really ties in well with Traka and ASSA ABLOY’s philosophies, which are focused on ‘innovation through people’.

We want to put the customer at the centre of all our decisions and ensure we lead with that idea in mind.

Can you tell us why key and asset management is such a critical part of the global industry?

Keys are an obvious part of the security ecosystem, but when you’ve got to manage those in an environment, for example, like a correctional facility, you need to ensure that the right people are accessing the right keys at the right times.

Whatever sort of business, organisation or facility it may be, our software and hardware solutions allow people to do this whilst enabling them to seamlessly integrate our solutions in their day to day business processes, not only without being disruptive, but also making them more effective and efficient.

If our solutions are deployed in an oil and gas setting, for instance, our tailored software means that operators can run maintenance programs in a safe way unique to that environment.

Whilst our primary focus in this type of scenario is security, we are also looking at creating efficiency and mitigating many of the risks and challenges facing these users and locations.

If you have got a high value asset or restricted area that you want to make sure authorised personnel can access securely, our solutions are ideal.

Another example is demonstrated by our KEYper range. A car dealership looking to improve efficiency will be able to use an application on their phone to check that the key to a vehicle they want to show a potential customer is available.

By quickly checking to see if they are able to show that vehicle, it means they are not wasting time going back and forth and checking all the keys.

This makes them more reliable and efficient whilst helping to create an overall better customer experience, which is a win/win.

In addition to the use cases you have highlighted for us, what other industries and markets are important to Traka?

This largely depends on where you look around the world. As I touched on, in the US the car dealerships and automotive space is very big, but data centres, corporate campuses, higher education, healthcare, retail and government are other key areas for us in this region as well.

In the UK, retail is equally important, but so are prisons and police forces, particularly when it comes to weapons management.

When looking at Africa, specifically South Africa, it’s very mining focused. Equally, in Australia, there’s a mining focus, but there’s also a government focus – so it all depends on where in the world you are looking.

For Traka, this is a unique differentiator, we don’t just try and sell an “off the shelf” product; we sell a very market sector focused solution that will help our customers be better at what they do and mitigate risks.

What are Traka’s plans for the future?

Within the next five years, we really want to continue evolving our growth plans to become a pure solutions provider for our customers.

We want to look at how we innovate commercially. For example, are there different ways we can service customers by looking at how we take our solutions to market? How can we maintain our position of leading through technology?

Moreover, if you look at some of the trends around AI, can we do predictive maintenance and support?

Another focus area will be looking to continue our growth across the globe.

We’ve been pretty successful in this regard, having gone from being effectively a UK business from inception through to 2012 and transforming into a global entity.

As we continue to grow, we can continue to add value for our customers and partners.

You mentioned leading through innovation and focusing on technology to drive forward. Is that an important thing to you on a personal level?

I love technology. Ultimately, the business that I look after is a technology-led business. We manufacture and design all of our own hardware.

Whether this is done within the UK, the US or in Australia, across our R&D teams, we’ve got almost 100 people looking at constantly updating software, new features, workflows and any other ways that we can deliver value to the business.

That’s really how we’ve remained the global leader and helped take away customer pain points – and we will continue this journey to evolve through innovation and evolution.

Finally, when it comes to developments in AI, what does the future of key and asset management look like?

When we talk about things like AI, I think it’s early days and a lot of it is speculative – and it’s easy to get excited!

But we can already see situations where our vending solutions for keys would benefit if the software was capable of learning the profile of a user’s day, offering the right key at the right time, and driving various other efficiencies, both front and back end.

I do think we could also be moving into an era of predictive maintenance, where technology could allow us to get ahead of the curve when it comes to part replacements and damage, all in an effort to minimise customer downtime.