Tire Tracks: Driving the Logistics Industry
Explore over-the-road (OTR) shipping with Banyan Technology's Tire Tracks® podcast. Join host and Banyan Senior Business Development Manager Patrick Escolas as he engages leaders and personalities driving the OTR industry. From first to final mile, gain insight into best practices, innovative technology, and the latest industry news from the leading freight execution software provider. Watch for new episodes twice monthly!
Tire Tracks: Driving the Logistics Industry
Strategies to Prevent Shipping Fraud and Theft | Episode 38
Join us for episode 38 of Banyan Technology's Tire Tracks® podcast as David Warrick, EVP at Overhaul, shares expert strategies for combating shipping fraud and theft -- a growing threat in the logistics industry.
David explains how criminal organizations are increasingly sophisticated, employing tactics like GPS jamming to target high-value goods. He shares insights from his extensive experience managing global supply chains at leading companies like Microsoft and Coca-Cola, discussing effective measures such as real-time tracking and AI-driven security solutions. Learn actionable tips to safeguard your operations against these pervasive risks and hear about Overhaul's partnerships with law enforcement to enhance cargo security.
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Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
David Warrick on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-warrick-2b617a3/
RiskGPT: https://over-haul.com/riskgpt/
Learn more about Overhaul: https://over-haul.com/
Plug and Play Technology Centre: https://www.plugandplaytechcenter.com/
Patrick Escolas: https://www.linkedin.com/in/patrick-escolas-700137122/
Banyan Technology: https://banyantechnology.com/
Banyan Technology on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/banyan-technology/
Banyan Technology on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/banyantechnology
Banyan Technology on X: https://twitter.com/BanyanTech
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Hey, everybody. It's Patrick Escolas. Thanks for joining me for another episode of Banyan Technology's Tire Tracks. Today, I'm joined with Overhaul's EVP, David Warrick. Hey, David. How are you doing?
I'm good, Patrick. Thanks for inviting me. Pleasure to be here.
Hey, it's a pleasure to have you. Now before we get too deep into anything, I noticed you have an accent. It'd be hard not to. Where's that from? I imagine it's– I can tell that it's not Mexico like Doc Contreras that I talked to recently.
No. I'm originally from Belfast in Northern Ireland. But I've traveled the world and lived around a lot of different places. My beautiful Northern Irish accent is sort of tempered over time. And that's probably a good thing. Otherwise, you may not understand me today, Patrick.
I'd have a decent chance just because I have plenty of Southern Irish out of Mayo. Whenever I go over there, I can I can pick up pieces. But for the rest of us, I'm glad that you've domesticated a bit of that wild rogue you have there. Yeah. As I like to do with everything, before we get into a little bit about Overhaul and what the organization is doing, let's talk about you. Everybody seems to have a different path and journey into logistics and supply chain, what have you. Where did yours start? How did you get here?
Oh, it's a pretty complex journey to be honest, Patrick. I'm a manufacturing engineer by trade and a chartered engineer. Started off my very early career in Coca-Cola with one of the bottlers based in Belfast. High-volume manufacturing. I had the opportunity to be a project engineer on the Hong Kong airport. If you've ever flown through Hong Kong, that beautiful big airport, that's on an island. Well, I was one of the original engineers back in the mid-90s who built the island and then built the airport on top of it.
No way.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Spent a couple years living out in Hong Kong just before the Chinese handover. It was the biggest construction job in the world. And that's where I really – I think that's where I really set my original supply chain roots, to be honest. A huge Logistics exercise. And, also, dealing with manufacturers from around the world to get all of those different pieces into Hong Kong through the old airport and then build the island and build the new airport on top of it. It was an incredible way to start a career.
I then joined Andersen Consulting. It's now known as Accenture. And I joined that back in the Dublin office in Ireland and spent a couple of years with Andersen Consulting as a process consultant. Working a lot with indigenous Irish manufacturing companies. At the time, Ireland was kind of the manufacturing hub of Europe at the time.
And what time frame was that around?
That was the late 90s.
Okay.
Spent a couple of years helping companies working on a lot of different consulting jobs. And my last consulting job for Andersen Consulting was with a new-age company called Microsoft.
Very new-age. Yeah.
And so, Microsoft, they were coming off the back of the Windows 95 release. And they were still doing a lot of the manufacturing. If you can imagine – if you can remember back, Patrick, and this is going to test your age. But the Microsoft products were big boxes of Windows and Office. Lots of discs and lots of manuals. They had moved from insource to outsource manufacturing. And I was brought in as a consultant to help that transition. Microsoft kind of liked me. And I was doing two years of everything.
It's a good thing to be liked by Microsoft. Yeah.
Well, at the time – I mean, when I joined, Bill Gates was still the CEO. It was maybe 25,000 employees worldwide. And I joined in Dublin at the European operations center. And my plan was to join for two years and see what happened and then go and get a real job.
Go and get a real job. As if building the Hong Kong Airport or working at Microsoft wasn't it. How long did that tenure turn into?
Well, the two years turned into 23 years. And in that time, I worked on the original Xbox project. I was on the production line for the very first console that was ever built. I built the supply chain for Europe, Middle East, and Africa. We obviously grew the Xbox business through Xbox 360 and then into Xbox One. We then bought a phone company in sort of 2011, 2012 called Nokia. And I was responsible for the integration of the Nokia supply chain into Microsoft.
We then decided that we didn't really want to be a phone company. I was responsible for dismantling that again. We then started a new product range called Surface, Microsoft Surface. And I was heavily involved in designing, and running, and building the supply chain for that, including running factories in Southern China. And then the pandemic hit. And, obviously, I was running global supply chain for Microsoft devices business.
We were a $10-billion supply chain. We were shipping 80 or 90 million Microsoft things into 142 countries around the world. And coming out of the pandemic, I'd spent a lot of time really struggling with big infrastructure, ERP systems. Not helping supply chain do what it was required to do. I started down this path of looking at new-age technologies and then integrating them into the Microsoft supply chain. And Microsoft really liked this idea. And they gave me a title. It was Chief Supply Chains Technology Officer with the responsibility of finding these next wave of technologies and bringing them in.
I spent a lot of time with private equity, with venture capital, and with the startup community. Really understanding the amount of investment going in the supply chain was incredible. And so, in 2022, after 23 years, I decided that I would retire. I'd spent enough time in Corporate America. And enough was enough. And I was fascinated by this continued investment in supply chain. I decided that I would go and explore this further and do the next level of my education and understand how the money trail worked and how these early-stage companies were able to create. And that's when I got a phone call probably three days after my announced retirement. Barry Conlon, the CEO of Overhaul, called me and said, "Are you really retired? Or do you want to do something?" And so, we had a conversation over a couple of months. And then I joined Overhaul as Executive Vice President.
And I do work with a lot of other early-stage companies in the industry. I'm the Chair of Innovation for The Visibility Council based out of Silicon Valley. Bringing together the Fortune 500 academia investors and early-stage companies. I sit on a number of advisory boards helping young companies. And I work with Plug and Play Technology Center out of, again, the valley. Just helping to groom those really early-stage ideas and make them into something that's going to change the nature of supply chain. Patrick, I've kind of evolved from a big practitioner in supply chain to being really focused on helping supply chain evolve and helping drive this industry forward.
Yeah. You made a comment before the call that if anything came up – you've done enough supply chain throughout the years. If any question – if you didn't know the answer, then it'd be a really strange one because you've kind of been everywhere, seen everything. And based on a little bit of that background, I would tend to believe you. Peeling back on a few of those levels, I, A, want to thank you for things from my childhood like Halo, the Halo 2 release that I actually worked at GameStop for. Specifically, so I could get a 360, I worked that midnight release. But I'm just going to put this out there. Halo 1 was the best one. I'm a purist. But it's okay. I won't hold that against you because the 360 was a great console.
But going back towards where Overhaul and before that. Pure supply chain and getting things where they need to be. And then coming into what feels or at least most of the people I talk to are more on the straight logistics execution side. Is that something where you were working directly with in the past? Or had you done a lot of delegation? And as long as it got there, you were big-picture planning. Were you down there at the execution level as well?
I mean, as a leader, my philosophy has always been I would never ask anybody to do something that I haven't tried or done myself.
It's a damn good philosophy.
And having that under – I spent my day on the warehouse floor. I spent my time wrapping pallets at 4:00 in the morning to make sure that we got those big launches out. You'll see behind me my Halo 2 plaque and my Halo 3 plaque. I was the guy in charge to make sure that all of those copies got to all of those stores at the right time and the right place.
I've lived in the trenches. And as such, I spent a lot of time with carriers, with logistics providers, with brokers, with 3PLs, with 4PLs not only as part of running a very big supply chain, but also to understand what the pain points were. And I had a very much a hands-on philosophy of, when there was a problem that was impacting our customers, I needed to understand it. I needed to be at the coalface to understand what we as a shipper could do to improve that.
And we won – numerous years in Microsoft, we won Supplier of the Year from some of the biggest retailers in the world simply because of our approach. And our approach was this isn't that we've handed it off. So it's not our problem anymore. It's still our name on the box. And so, whatever we could do to become that supplier's best supplier was just foundational in terms of our attitude and our approach to supply chain. That was something. That was my own personal belief. It filtered in through my teams. We got excited about winning those customer awards. But we also got excited about changing the nature of supply chain and actually doing things the way they needed to be done.
That's an awesome statement. And, yeah, it's an impressive award, especially back then with the competition. And Microsoft still hadn't quite made itself the pillar in at least the gaming and the console industry that it is now. And I won't go too far into that world. I could talk about that for two, three hours. But it's not what anyone's here to listen to me about. That's more on the hobby side.
But tell me about – and we'll go get back in a little more of your role with it. But from the outside in, what is Overhaul? Yeah, give me a bit of a bio. And what makes it unique? And we'll go into some questions I might have from there.
Overhaul is really about supply chain security and integrity. The founders have been in this industry doing this type of solution for 20-odd years. And they realized that any cargo shipping is absolutely at risk. We have a saying at Overhaul, "Cargo at rest is cargo at risk." Because it's money. Every piece of inventory is actually money. And so, from a supply chain perspective, you've got to understand that. The high-value goods and even the low-value goods, they all have a price in the market. And as such, you have to do something to protect your cargo. You're putting it into a very distributed network. And this is not about accidental pillage. This is organized – think for one second that this – the sopranos of I'll throw a few dollars at a driver and get the truck. This is truly organized crime, whereby the big crime syndicates, they know where the high-value products are. They know who carries them. They know where they're transacted. And they know where the weak points are in the supply chain.
And at Overhaul, what we do is we help you sleep at night. When Overhaul first got introduced to Microsoft, it was just before a major Xbox console release. And I had suffered from some thefts.
I would imagine that it was kind of a – that was a golden goose if someone knew where a bunch of consoles were going to be in a truck all at once.
Oh, absolutely. And if you can imagine, any truckload of Xbox consoles is a multi-million-dollar haul if successful. Not to mention games like Halo where you're shipping 200, 300 units on a pallet before launch. It's a very hot commodity. Everybody wants to get their hands on it. I had problems. And I looked across the industry. I found Overhaul, they were an Irish company which always has a little bit of a draw to me.
I don't blame you.
And I sat down with Barry Conlon, the CEO, and he just explain to me this is why we exist and this is how we protect. And I looked at it and said, "There's lots of companies can give me visibility. But visibility only tells me where things are." Some companies will tell me that something bad is happening. But Overhaul is a [inaudible 00:14:14]. They track. They trace. When something bad happens, Overhaul [inaudible 00:14:20]. They don't call as the shipper and say, "You've got a problem." They're already on it.
We've got connectivity into local law enforcement globally. We've got specialists on our team who come from backgrounds in the FBI and law enforcement. They understand how those channels work. And local law enforcement relies actually on Overhaul. Because we have got – our data is so good. We know the driver. We know the truck. We know where it came from. We know where it's going to. We understand when bad things happen. And we understand what happens next.
And our ability to feed that information into the people who can actually stop it and impact it is completely critical. Because when you think about it – and I used to have this conversation with Barry. Because he would tell me, he would say, "Hey, if you lose a trailer, it takes thieves somewhere between 5 and 15 minutes to offload that trailer and be gone." And I was amazed and I said, "That's fantastic."
I was to say, can I get them to work at the dock? Because we could really create sufficiency.
Yeah. I need you to find them and I need to hire them. That's amazing. If I can do that. But joking aside, I mean you've got such a small window of time. It's all about understanding what's happening and understanding the paths that you have to connect.
I've been talking recently with – it's Trucker Tools and some carriers. Because, especially within United States, there's not an arm of the law or enforcement specifically for these kind of logistics or supply-chain-like crimes. Often, even after somebody finds out something's going wrong, there's nothing – it's a heart of, "Okay, what do I do with this? Do I just call my local police station and figure that out?" And within that, what would Overhaul do in that? I mean, other than moving these things in tanks? Because you are still limited to those same resources, how do they use them more effectively than just me with the same kind of visibility like you said?
In terms of the partnerships that we have with the organized departments with like California Highway Patrol, it's not – while theft is widespread, there are still elements of centricity. And so, you think about anywhere around the Port of Long Beach, the Port of LA, Memphis, Louisville, Chicago, there's certain hotspots. And so, we're very tied in from a partnership perspective with local law enforcement in those areas.
And then it's not let's wait for something to happen and then act on it. We are continually watching. There's known bad actors. We understand how they move and how they work. Recently, we' brought a product to market this year that we call intelligence as a service. And the intelligence as a service piece does very simple straightforward things like checking driver names.
Whenever a load is brokered, and that may be subcontracted, we'll still get the driver's name. And if that driver's name is on a watch list or we know that they are connected, we are able to actually ping the broker and say, "Yeah, that's not a good idea. You need to have a different driver or a different subcontractor."
This isn't about, "Hey, we're better at calling 911 than you are." This is we are – this is an ongoing practice whereby we're sharing and collaborating on information on what we're seeing, on what the cargo crime task forces are seeing. Sharing that information, they rely on us, we rely on them. And then we have boots on the grind. We're keeping an eye on these facilities. We're keeping an eye on what those movements are. And we're pulling all of that intelligence together and then offering it out to shippers and to brokers saying, "We can actually help you be a little bit more preventative, so that we're not waiting for something to happen."
And what kind of steps do you take or do you recommend someone to take to be preventative? What are some of the, I guess, at-risk procedures that somebody could have? And where does technology play both in as kind of it could leave you open and to really shore up some of those vulnerabilities?
I mean, there's only so much you can do to prevent, right? Unfortunately, people are people. And when there's a lot of high-value cargo moving around, there's always going to be that inherent risk. However, as a shipper, know your supply chain know the people that you're actually using to transact your goods. And make sure that you have security protocols. Secure yards, driver check-ins, all of those good things. Even in yard management.
I mean, you've got to understand the sophistication that we're dealing with right now. In a recent case, without putting any names out there, a truck arrived at a yard what looked like a supervisor with a clipboard and a high visibility vest branded came to the driver of the truck and said, "Oh, yeah. We just need you – we're a little bit full right now. Can you just park 300 yards down the street and we'll call you when we're ready?" The truck was gone within 10 minutes. And the driver was not aware. The driver thought he was following protocol.
What we try to do is we make sure that we have a numerous set of procedures that happen on the checkout of the truck. And we make sure that we have contact with the driver. All the phone numbers are up to date everything else. We educate in terms of these are some of the things that you need to watch out for.
We've been in a position whereby we have been able to monitor certain distribution centers in high-risk areas. And we've actually noticed some activity. Cars following trucks out of the yard. That type thing.
Really? Okay.
Oh, yeah. And then being able to alert the distribution center and say, "We need to involve local law enforcement. And you might need to hold off just for 24 hours while we get a better presence here." And we do that level of – we have that level of intelligence. And we're not shy about pushing that out there, Patrick, to be honest.
The preventative measures are follow the protocols. Know your supply chain. And do everything you can to keep it safe. But then don't just assume that everything will be okay. Expect the worst.
Yeah. And expecting the worst, and with a lot this being a topic more and more with the theft, the fraud, kind of a lot of these bad players in the space, it feels like there's more now than there was maybe five years ago. Is that true? Or is this a perception I'm getting maybe from different media coverage or now be me being more involved in this industry and I just hear it more?
The pandemic, to a certain extent, was an accelerant. You had a lot of stalled inventory. And that led to opportunity. What we've seen is somewhere between 200% to 300% increase in cargo theft basically in the last four to five years. And because it's now a target for organized crime, they realize the high-value that's shipping around the country and the opportunity to move that in the secondary market. It becomes a very different proposal, if you like.
And so, yes, you're absolutely right. There's a heightened risk. And it's become a lot more structured and a lot more defined. And the sophistication – again, to try and explain to people, it's kind of this is the Fast and the Furious.
I was thinking about that when you explained it. I'm thinking about Vin Diesel sliding with the Civic under the truck here.
I don't have a Civic. And I'm never going to do that, Patrick. But that is kind of –
We all want to.
The level of Bluetooth jammers, wave signal jammers. The sophistication that the criminals have. They don't turn up opportunistically with a hammer and say, "Let's see what we can do." They are absolutely organized. They have angle grinders. They take the doors off trailers. They have the facilities to be able to move product at an incredible pace. This is a big challenge.
And at Overhaul, we're doing our best to look after the world's cargo. We are trying to keep it safe because we understand this space from 20 years of experience. In our leadership team, we've got thousands of – I'm not the only supply chain nerd. We've got thousands of years of supply chain experience. People who have ran, managed, designed big supply chains across all industry segments. We really have a clear understanding of the risk, the process. What it takes? And then apply that through technology to what can we do to keep the world supply chain safer.
And you say apply that through technology. What are some examples that you can use that? Is there AI involved? Is it just being able to access, I don't know, dash cams? Or what does that look like? How does technology find a role in this? I mean, you talked about cars following the trucks out of the yard. Is that because you've got someone in a van with binoculars? How are you gathering this data? How are you getting that back to people? And, yeah, how is technology playing a role in that?
It's kind of all of the above. And the beautiful thing is that we're moving very quickly from the internet of things to the internet of everything. Everything's going to have a signal. Everything's going to have a ping.
I think we're already there. Yeah.
It's getting close. Whenever your fridge talks to you, then you know that we may have gone so far.
I got a new dishwasher. And it literally goes like, "Do you want to download the app?" I'm like, "How is that going to help? I can't load the washing stuff." Do I have to have some weird system where it has the little pods ready to go? But I was like, "How would this even help?" Is it just going to say, "Hey, have a great day?" But, no. I'm going off on a rant. But you're 100% right. Everything is going to have a ping, an app, or some sort of a network connection.
And so, we built a platform, which has really been designed around harnessing those signals and pulling in all of that real-time information. A lot of visibility tools have been built on harvesting milestones from the carrier network.
Right.
And while that's really interesting, unfortunately, there's a huge amount of apathy, if you like. Nothing is real-time. Everything has to be batch jobbed and then moved. When you've got a direct ping from a trailer, or from a pallet, or from a master carton, or from a parcel that you're receiving real-time information on, first of all, it cleans up. Do we know where it is? Absolutely.
Then we can geofence distribution center yards. We can geofence ports. We can do all of these things. It's not just a dot on a map. We actually understand what that dot represents. And we understand where it could go wrong. An un-scheduled stop. A deviation from route. All of those things are really interesting.
There's an existing amount of telemetry on every truck in the US. Every truck has to have an ELD. We actually gather information and take the pings from the ELD. The driver has a phone. The phone has an app. We pull all of that information. We're continually triangulating around all of these different pieces, including carrier milestones, to make sure that we have the best possible visibility.
Now, when you have all of that data, then it becomes a really interesting problem. Because you've got to reduce the noise and figure out what the real signal is. And that's where machine learning and generative AI play a massive role. We brought a product to market last year called RiskGPT. And RiskGPT – really, it harnesses the GPT engine to gather those disparate amounts of data and then make sense of them. To look for patterns and then to suggest a sequence.
When something bad happens, we're not leaving it up to a watch officer at 3:00 in the morning sitting in a remote call center to try and figure out the action. The platform now understands exactly what's going on. And based on all of its history of everything that we've ever seen, actually suggests a pattern of these are the correct steps in terms of what you should do next.
That's amazing. Because I had imagined, yeah, some guy needing more and more coffee as he sees this. Comes off half asleep off his desk and go, "Oh, crap. But, no, that makes a lot more sense. And it has a lot more processed next steps instead of a panic, "Oh, crap. What do I do? Okay. Here, it's telling me step-by-step what I need to do now."
And then the magical thing is, because we've now got five billion data points, we're adding 150 million a month at this stage. And what does that mean? It means that we're creating a mesh, a structure. We're not going to be able to look at any specific carrier, any specific load, any specific route and actually assign it a risk score preemptively to say, "Based on everything that we're seeing right now and based on everything that we've seen in the past, there's a problem probability that your cargo may be at risk. We can recommend some things that you should do. Or we can offer an alternative route for you to take."
Think about that, Patrick. We've taken something that is instead of planning for success, we're actually mitigating for failure. And we're spending our time calculating. And this is all using generative AI. Generative AI is now calculating these random data points and then producing a score which is telling you your cargo may be a great risk than you originally thought. You need to take an action. And then helping you understand what that action is. And that could be weather. It could be crime. It could be disruption. Any and all of the above now come together in this beautiful model hosted by generative AI, which now starts to make sense of the data and create a preemptive plan.
And that is an amazing, as you said, mesh of all these different pieces to kind of put something in front of somebody is – and it sounds all of these things that you do, or that Overhaul does, and all of these situations that could be extremely costly. I mean, is something like Overhaul – and this is just a curious question. Is this something where you – it's worth it? What's the value add as far as an ROI for something like this? What's that average organization's loss to fraud or on a year that they could be mitigating with something like Overhaul services? What does that look like from – obviously, it's going to change from enterprise-level shipper to somebody else. But from an average, what kind of numbers have you guys seen?
It's very hard to give you specifics. But it's not uncommon for loss in a consumer electronics business for a large-scale company, it's tens of millions of dollars every year easily. And then you think about it as that's the lost from a cost perspective. But, also, think about high-value items, which are in consumer demand. You're actually disappointing customers. When that product gets stolen, it means it's not getting to its destination, which means it's not getting to a shelf to a consumer. It's not just a physical loss on that cost. It's the opportunity loss of, "Well, this particular thing that I was going to buy is no longer available. I'm going to buy –"
I'm going to go with your competitor. Yeah. No. That's a great call out there. That it's not only kind of hits your wallet. But it's also going to hit your brand at a certain point too. Spoken like somebody that's had to look at that from both sides before.
Maybe. I can't divulge. But maybe. But when you think about it like that, then any loss is bad. There's no such thing as an acceptable loss. And that's the approach that we take. Our managed service focuses on recovery. When something bad happens, can we recover? Our recovery rates for stolen goods are over 90%. That's why our customers stay with us. Whenever they lose a trailer, we are so connected and we are so good at managing that, after the bad thing has happened, it’s just incredible. And that saves companies a lot of money. But it also lets chief supply chain officers sleep at night knowing that Overhaul has their back and we are watching their cargo.
And that was always my piece in Microsoft, Patrick. It was when Barry Conlon, the CEO, would ask me, "What is the thing that you really like about Overhaul?" It's, "Barry, I don't have to worry because I know that you are." And that really helps me sleep at night.
That's a good pitch. And I like the sound of it. Especially this statement about no acceptable loss is another fantastic kind of statement there that, from my understanding and how you've described it, kind of is a great guiding principle it sounds like for Overhaul overall.
Now, within a lot of what we've talked about and the current values that you add and some of the market issues and vulnerabilities, what does – as a look towards from now into a little bit of the future. Get out to your crystal ball and you know rub your beard. But what's coming over the horizon is they going to be more and more of these organized attempts at the high-end electronic. Or like you said, any shipments at all. Or services like Overhaul and some of the technology pieces going to help us prevent more of that? How do you see within this space how the future looks for supply chain within that regard of safety or loss prevention?
It's going to be a beautiful dichotomy of organized crime are going to get more sophisticated. The fact that it's so easy to move goods right now – as you and I have experienced the growth of the personal shopping experience, and your ability to use eBay, and countless other platforms to buy those goods. That wasn't available 20 years ago. It was much harder to move stolen goods. It's not that difficult anymore. The ability to sell in that secondary market means that inventory now really has turned into cash. And that cash conversion is really simple.
I don't need a fence. I just need a few unique eBay vendors to put all my stuff through. Okay. that's a great point.
And so, therefore, the movement of inventory and turning it into cash has become much easier. That means that the supply chain is seeing an even more heightened risk. What's going to happen from a security perspective? Devices are going to get smarter. They're going to have more information to help that prevention.
We were always concerned about the ability to – typically, there would be a light sensor inside a trailer. And when you open that back door, the light sensor would activate and say, "Oh, the back door is opened." But if you're parked at a truck stop in Arizona and it's middle of the night, when you open that back door, it doesn't generate any light. It's not recognizable.
Actually, we worked on creating a device this year called the intelligent door seal, which is actually an optical cable as part of the door seal on the back of the trailer. And so, if the trailer doors are open in any way, it breaks the seal and, obviously, creates an alert.
That's awesome.
Moving technology – and cameras are going to get more sophisticated. Drones are going to get more sophisticated. There's going to be more sensors on everything. It's an exciting time for the industry in terms of supply chain needs to be more connected anyway. We are pushing that agenda with our hardware suppliers in terms of creating those next-generation devices. But it's not just about security. It's about visibility. It's about democratizing inventory. Because you're going to know exactly where it is.
While we're focused on security as the way forward, security is actually going to be the catalyst which may in fact end up changing and moving supply chain a huge step forward by opening up that true inventory. Where is my unit? Why is a truck not a distribution center? There's a lot of things that supply chain needs to evolve on. And security and the work that we're doing at Overhaul may actually be the foundational blocks of getting to that next stage, which just excites me from an industry perspective. Because I spent so much time trying to move the industry forward in my other work. And this is the type of thing that I know. Sometimes the solution to a problem actually is an opportunity for a multitude of other issues. And I feel like we're at that point of inflection, Patrick.
Oh, it's a great reflection there that all of these steps you're taking to make things more secure, it's really just going to – could, like you said, give a better end product for knowing exactly where everything is just for the sake of supply chains. Not necessarily for security. But as a tertiary benefit.
And, David, thank you so much for a lot of this information as me thinking of different ideas, and opportunities, and challenges that I wouldn't have thought of at the supply chain level. But as we kind of draw near – and like I said, if I could, ' I'd talk to you more on the whole Microsoft gaming thing for another two, three hours. But instead of that, as we kind of draw to a close, one thing I've always done with everybody I talk to is kind of hand over my soapbox. Here's the platform. What's one thing you want people to take away from this? Whether that's from David Warrick. Whether that's from Overhaul. In any case, this is your message to, as I always joke, my 13 or 14 people that'll watch and view this. But here's your here's your soapbox.
Oh, Patrick, that's really dangerous for me. That soapbox alone could last six or seven hours. Look, first of all, thank you, really. Thank you very much for the discussion. Great questions. And any time that you want to talk the history of Xbox, I was there for every part of it, Patrick. I would happily share those war stories. We had a lot of fun. And it was an amazing time.
The thing that I would really tell people is supply chain security is a real challenge. It's a real problem. The supply chains that we have designed over time are fragile. And they're fragile not just in terms of their construct, but also in terms of every part of them. I think organized crime has found a weak spot. They found a chank in the armor. And they're more than happy to leverage that.
And so, as you go forward, Overhaul, we are passionate about securing your cargo. And it's kind of fun to be in a company that we worry about everybody else's problems. But I kind of like doing that. We use the latest technology. We use the latest devices. And we really want your cargo to reach its intended destination in a safe and responsible way. And we want you to be able to continue to delight your customers.
With that said, don't be complacent about this. This is a hard-hitting topic. We are very much focused on helping across industry and driving security further in to the supply chain. We are only happy whenever nothing happens. Whenever there's no crime, whenever there's no event –
A boring shipment is a great shipment.
Exactly. That's exactly it. But we are actually really good at making those shipments boring. Boring works. Let us be your boring partner.
Hey, I like that. That's a great way to pull it through. Anyone watching that has more interests – and here's one for you, David. Someone who hears this and thinks that Overhaul might be a good partner or wants to learn more, where would they go to figure out how they can get Overhaul to help them and live that no acceptable loss and boring shipments type lifestyle?
Oh, perfectly simple. We're over-haul.com. Please visit us there. Or just connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm more than happy to talk to people about supply chain. As you may have guessed, supply chain is my passion. It is my life. It is what I do.
He hates talking about it.
I just love – I love connecting with everybody else in the industry because the answers are out there. And sometimes those connected tissues help us find the way forward. Please, over-haul.com. Or just connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm more than happy to have a conversation.
Hey, you make it simple there, too. David, thank you so much for your time. At this time, A, if you like what you see, like, comment, subscribe. We'd like to hear what you think about any of this. But, also, the Banyan Connect Conference '24 is coming to tropical downtown Cleveland, Hotlanta and Las Vegas at the end of September and bits in October. I would love to see David. I would love to see you at some of them. And would love to see any of my listeners there to hear about some of Banyan's offerings, some of our partners like Overhaul. And as well as some of our other items coming around the bend.
David, thank you so much for your time. It was great meeting you. And, yeah, I'm going to take you up on the two or three hours about Halo, and Microsoft, and Xbox. This is the most excited – I've been leaving one of these. Because no one talks to me about video games enough on these podcasts. I get an opportunity now.
Thank you, David. Appreciate all your time today.
Thanks, Patrick.
Hey, have a great one.