[Guy Yehiav] Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us, this morning. Great to see everyone here. We're going to talk about end-to-end product governance with stealth real-time asset tracking. It's basically about combating freight thefts, knowing where your inventory is, and in what condition they are actually. I will introduce Mike in a few minutes, but I'm very proud in order to have Mike Jesse, Senior Vice President at EssilorLuxottica, here with me today.
I'll start with something that I really like speaking about because over the career, I'm learning every day. When I started my first company, Demantra, I implemented demand driven supply networks, a lot of very complex supply chain solutions. 1998-99, it was all around demand driven supply network, to know what's the demand like at the endpoint and then working backwards on the supply optimization. But the thing that I've learned the most is that customers need to get the quick value.
And not just that, it needs to be easy to use to create the longevity of that value. So if someone is a main user and they've been promoted, there's a new user, it needs to be very easy and catchy to actually start using it and generate the value.
When I joined Oracle as the head of supply chain strategy there, I learned about the scale, and that means that you don't need a whole class of people to come and talk about the ROI that the customer is going to get. You don't need too many training. Again, it needs to be very easy to use.
When we initiated Profitect, it was all around, well, you know what? When you look at numbers, numbers doesn't mean the same thing to different people. When you look at an Excel spreadsheet, you know, you could have one initiative as an output, another person will have another one. We are still leveraging Excel as a main communicator for actions even today.
But in 2010, we coined the term prescriptive analytics, which means stop sending Excel spreadsheet to people. Just tell people what they should do, and therefore, they will do the best to optimize the outcome. People want to do the right thing. Just tell them what they should do. And with that, you have the ease of use and the adoption. Words mean more than numbers.
When I joined Zebra, we talked about IoT hardware and software combined. Because if the hardware and the software are working better in harmony, you get an exponential value out of it because there's no, you know, software that is disconnected from the hardware. When I joined SmartSense about two and a half years ago, we spoke a lot about how can we make IoT scale easy to use, easy to adopt.
And what we found out is that the market is very fragmented. There's a lot of IoT companies out there, and one Bluetooth sensor or Zigbee sensor or LoRaWAN sensor doesn't speak with the other. And so the idea was, let's work with our competitors, which sounds crazy, but it actually worked. We, today, work with a lot of our competitors that manufacture sensors that compete with us, but with a focus on value harvestation for our customers.
And so creating an IoT backbone that can speak with a lot of different sensors, even competitors, that creates that, value harvestation very easily and across the board.
So there's one app or one enterprise application, that solves that problem. And we did that in a very scaled environment across multiple verticals.
So you can see a lot of amazing brands across grocery and life sciences and food manufacturing and food service and warehouse and logistics and then hospital and healthcare. By the way, if you look at those 5 verticals, they actually share specific, problems and issues and challenges.
For example, in retail pharmacy, there was a traceability act about three years ago. Well, FSMA 204 is coming to your neighborhood in January 2026. It's very similar. And so traceability act on life sciences is very similar to the food traceability act that's coming soon. And, again, we serve all of them at scale, tens of thousands of users, 100 millions of assets, sensing with our competitors in order to provide a one platform for IoT that serves all of those verticals at scale.
And that's kind of the idea behind what we do here at SmartSense. You can even think about we had a customer that said, “Hey, can you help me with our car washes?” Right?
And the car wash has a lot of challenges. Besides the fact that in the northern atmosphere, water could freeze, you need them to mix the soap and, you know, create not too much acid in the mix. And so we created a solution for a car wash. Some of them, again, with our competitors, for example, on the pH in a sushi, we're working with Hanna sensors.
For a dishwasher temperature monitoring, we're working with ThermoWorks. Those are amazing competitors, but also amazing partners of ours.
And so we provide quickly deployment, easy solution to provide value, across all of your IoT needs. And now let's double click on, specifically, issues in the freight fraud and supply chain, in order to optimize where is my stuff and at what condition they actually are.
And with that, I would like to welcome Mike Jessee, SVP of Loss Prevention at Luxottica.
[Mike Jessee] Well, thank you very much. A little bit about myself. Right? So I've been on this asset protection loss prevention journey for it'll be 19 years coming up, in March, so all with Luxottica originally. And then when we merged with Essilor, obviously, now we're with EssilorLuxottica.
So within my role now, I lead all North America efforts, both when we look from a pillar perspective. So we have retail, traditional retail, brand enforcement investigations, and then we also have our operations and facility DC pieces. So those are sort of the three pillars that fall under my umbrella.
Prior to being blessed to have this role, I started out in, actually, law enforcement way back in the day, and then came over to Luxottica, working on, again, ORC investigations start. We had the absolute pleasure to start up a lot of new ideas, new initiatives across the company, whether that's our first ORC sort of team, starting up brand enforcement, counterfeiting activities within Americas and LATAM as well, and then obviously rolled over into this role.
So absolute pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me and I look forward to the conversation.
[Guy Yehiav] Great to have you. Thanks for joining us today. So when we talk about, you know, industry problem of loss prevention overall, loss prevention has been progressed in the last 20 years to, you know, total retail loss and looking at different losses that you find in the stores. But when you investigate all of it, a lot of it a lot of those holes or missing items came from gaps in supply chain. Can you explain a little bit how, you know, supply chain loss prevention is working?
[Mike Jessee] Yeah. I think, first, I would start with there's a lot of great work being done, a ton of great work. I think that I would say over the last couple years, right, with the rise of organized retail crime, the rise of loss and theft in the retail stores, you're starting to see, I would say, a refocus from traditional asset protection into logistics, DC supply chain investigations.
So that's from our perspective, that's where we're shifting. Right? Because if the product doesn't get to the consumer, whether that's through retail, through ecomm, through whatever, I simply don't have a job. Right? So it's important. So yeah.
[Guy Yehiav] Impact top line and bottom line, not just, not just the bottom line.
[Mike Jessee] Yeah. You know, unfortunately, you can see here, freight theft is up, you know, incident loss is up. Right? So, you know, I think the industry itself is ahead and aware of this, but we got some catch up to do. Right?
[Guy Yehiav] Yeah. So how do they actually steal or take pallets away from the supply chain? Do they just follow a truck? Do they wait for them at a pit stop? What are the different bad actors out there?
[Mike Jessee] So I'd say the answer is yes. Right? So I think it's a matter of, you know, roll this into any part of, again, supply chain, retail, what have you. If there's a gap, you have to recognize and realize that there's a lot of money in our product. Right? The good thing is people want to buy our product. The bad thing is people also want to take our product.
And so if there are gaps that we haven't identified, they're going to exploit it, they're going to identify it. Right? And then that's that cat and mouse game that we're continuously playing. Like, how do you stay ahead? Right? How do you stay ahead of the trends? How do you close your gaps? How do you either improve your processes, how do you improve your training? And while we're here, how do you improve your technology?
[Guy Yehiav] So, you know, I've seen a few presentations around which pit stop the truck should not stop at. Right. So do you have a map of areas that are more red than green than yellow, and you're monitoring your truck's movement and the inventory that is moving through it?
[Mike Jessee] Yeah. Great question. So we take a risk-based approach, right, where, you know, through, I would say, years of data, years of information, we know where our bigger risks are. And so when either, a, we work with Logistics Transportation to look for alternative routes, or we make sure that, again, the systems and stuff we have in place are giving us the confidence that if something is to take place in one of those areas, we're going to be aware of it pretty soon.
[Guy Yehiav] Yeah. So what are the tactical challenges, and how did you try to solve them, you know, in the past up until you tried the SmartSense solution?
[Mike Jessee] Yeah. So we're pretty open to trying a lot of things. Right? But it needs to work and it needs to work quick. Right? We don't have time to play around and wait and hope something works, and so I think to sort of speak to the to the slide here, our challenges, right, and the things that we're always trying to work on and improve on, right, is the lack of visibility, or lack of accountability, and then, obviously, how can we maximize our resources? You know, from a visibility perspective, you mentioned it a little bit before even with Profitect, where there's a lot of data. We're not lacking data, but that's not the problem. But how can we bring that together? How can we action on what, again, whether it's a SmartSense tag, whether it doesn't matter what the device is. Can we action on that piece of data? That's challenging. Right? And I think we'll talk later. I think that this has been a big win for us.
From an accountability perspective, you know, again, asset protection, we're looking to investigate. Right? Where we'll work with our, you know, our multiple stakeholders to make sure their business needs are met. Right? That it's replenished, that we get, you know, the insurance claim file, whatever. But at the end of the day, we want to investigate. In order to investigate, we need to have accurate detailed information so that we can further that investigation, we can further that conversation, whether it's internal or external. Right?
And then last but not least, again, when I spoke about the resource piece, if we're goinig to introduce something into our supply chain, whether it's a device, whether it's whatever, all of that is going to cost dollars, pennies to that cost of goods. So it needs to bring back that ROI. It must solve a problem within our supply chain so that it outweighs the cost of the cost that it's adding to that good. Right? And so in order to do that, it needs to be effective and efficient. Right? And because we can't throw, if there's people out there that can throw people at problems, love to talk to you. We can't. Right? We have to find and be effective.
[Guy Yehiav] And so Mike, so when you were promoted, because I was actually following your amazing career growth and your team. When you were promoted and said, you know what? Mike, take this supply chain challenge, what were the things that you were trying and why they couldn't solve that specific problem?
[Mike Jessee] Yeah. We spoke about a little bit before in that the traditional solutions, when we speak specifically about GPS and any type of trace and track technology, I don't want to speak bad about any other vendor. Right? However, we need multipurpose solutions. They're good, some of the things that are out there, but quite frankly, they weren't good enough. Right? Because they're large, battery life, accuracy of the unit themselves. You can read some of this on the slide. But at the end of the day, we needed better. We needed more. And I would say the one that I would highlight the most, right, is that sort of large bulky form factor. Those are big. They're not multipurposed. Right? I can't put that in something else to help another investigation, whether it's a, you know, if you guys ever seen a, you know, a pair of sunglasses, aren't big, so our boxes aren't massive. Our bulk shipments are. Our palettes are. But, again, I want a full investigation, not just that bulk.
[Guy Yehiav] Right. Because if it's large, the bad actors are learning very quickly what they need to take out or leave on the truck and actually take the pallet.
[Mike Jessee] Yeah. Great point. And I'm sorry. Yeah. Absolutely. Right? Because some way we have to market, some way we have to highlight it. They can identify it. They can do scans. They can identify that there's a GPS tracker in there. That doesn't help me. Doesn't help me at all.
[Guy Yehiav] Talk to us a little bit about, how did you initially implemented SmartSense. A little bit about, you know, the Voyage solution and what you find out.
[Mike Jessee] Again, as I mentioned it before, we don't have time to wait around, and I think that's first off, thanks to your team and thanks to your guys' openness to take our feedback, honestly, to accept the challenge because, you know, we've worked before on a few things. You sorta get one shot. Right? And you guys took your shot, and it's worked out well. I would say the implementation was as painless as it could be. Most of it was, honestly, educating our team on the solution, the value of the dashboard, how to execute on the dashboard, how do we pull out and change some of our internal processes to work with the device. The implementation was seamless.
[Guy Yehiav] What do we see here, for example, if you double click on a truck that is being highlighted here in yellow?
[Mike Jessee] Yeah. So what we did was we picked a couple of our main lanes. Right? So if we're going to go, go big. And so we picked some of our main lanes to see if the device was going to be as good or better than what we're currently using. And, again, full transparency, sometimes you think bigger is better. Right? Well, I can tell you as honestly as I'm sitting here, I would say smaller is better in this case because accuracy, I was anticipating it being equal, not better. I would say accuracy was better, which is a massive win and the device size.
So what you see here is one of our lanes, and the ability of the solution to actually identify one of our drivers simply doing a U-turn. Right? So hypothetically, they were supposed to stay straight on 20. They took an exit both prior to, as you see there, 49 is right sort of west of that. Supposed to take 49, they missed 49. They took the exit before. We were able to recognize that through the device. What that allows us to do, right, is then now make a decision. Do we need to do something? Is this a out of routine, exit? It was. But then what you notice here is the gentleman quickly gets back on. So we were able to engage, confirm, took the wrong exit. We get back on. We're okay.
I would say the other piece to this is, you know, not that I'm like some, you know, GPS unit here, but we're out in Shreveport. Right? This we're not out we're not in LA. We're not in a big city. And so the way the device works, and I'll let the smart people talk about that, you know, we're able to use all three areas and really, again, even with, I would say, bad cell reception, bad GPS still provide an accurate reflection of where that truck is, which is critical.
[Guy Yehiav] With that, I would like to drill down to the solution itself, and I would like to bring up Sammy Kolt, our Chief Product Officer, to talk a little bit more about our product.
[Sammy Kolt] Alright. So, hello, everyone. Good morning. As Guy said, I'm the, chief product officer for SmartSense. So, you know, we're going to elevate the conversation a little bit on kind of the overall solution that we built. Right? And then we'll go back to some examples that Mike was talking about. So, first of all, why did we even set off to create a solution for the market for asset tracking and condition tracking? You heard some of the challenges, right, from a product perspective, but we felt like there's still some stuff that are missing. Right?
You know, when companies want to ensure that their products are safe and at high quality, there's still a lack and gaps and visibility to understand that, for their product portfolio. Regulatory compliance is just intensifying. Right? Everywhere. All across, you know, food and supply chain and pharma. Right? Regulatory compliance just intensifying, and you have to start collecting that data, right, from your shipments and you're transporting your product and be able to prove that your product was at safe conditions during that movement.
Operational efficiency. Again, we're all asked to do more with same or even more with less. Right? So how can we help and automate things as much as possible and only ask resources, people, employees to intervene when there's an issue that they need to be doing? Customer trust and satisfaction. Again, at the end of the day, everything we do is because of our customers. We want them to be satisfied. We want to make sure that when they go to the store, when they go online and they order something, we want that product to be available for them because, otherwise, what's the point? Right? So, again, understanding, where the product is and what quality it is.
And then finally, we talk about loss prevention and risk reduction. Right? These are the important things for people like Mike, right, that kind of manage that risk on a daily basis, making sure that that risk-based approach is being covered with, with tracking, of your product.
So in terms of the applications, the use cases that we set off to build for the solution. So first of all, we looked at, again, inside network shipping. Right? All of you, that have companies that move product from one place to another ship these products, right, between your, locations, between the DC to the store, between the, you know, one DC to another DC. So we wanted to make sure that companies have good visibility into their network and where their product is and at what condition it is when it moves.
We also looked at seasonal overflows. More and more companies are now taking advantage of kind of overflow containers and locations, temporary locations that they want to hold product at, but they don't have the infrastructure, right, set up to track these overflow locations. Things like, you know, during holiday season. Right? A lot of grocers have overflow containers to hold the ham and the turkey. Right? During flu season, a lot of locations have overflow containers to hold additional, vaccines. Right? So we wanted to provide a product that will be easy to set up, quickly start monitoring these products, and then, you know, break it down once, once the season is over.
High value product protection. Right? So this is you know, a lot of you out there have products that are very high value that you use on a daily basis. Right? Things like pallet jacks, right, or any type of medical equipment that we move from one location to another. And we wanted to make sure that we build a solution that helps you protect these high value products.
We spoke about ORC theft reduction and freight theft, theft reduction. Right?
So these are the, this is kind of where Mike's focus is. And then ultimately shipping to customers. Right? We all are customers of someone, right, and consumers of products, and we receive a lot of products at home.
And then, you know, this is where we are starting to get trained to you know, whether it's, Domino's Pizza that gives you the meter or where is your product, and it's almost there to Amazon that now shows you the last you know, your driver is going to you know, has 10 more stops and is going to come and deliver it. So we wanted to create kind of a similar, experience ultimately for shipping to customers.
[Mike Jessee] So, Sammy, just real quick. I think, to me, and sorry for the curve ball here for you guys. To me, this is the most important slide, right, from a practitioner perspective. Because, again, traditional, sit back in your traditional space. We all understand the size, scope, and sort of, limitations of existing technology. To me, this is why we even originally even entertained the solution. Right? Because, again, I don't like one trick ponies. Right?
Whether it's a solution that does one thing. Again, going back to how do we maximize our value, how do we maximize our dollars back to the business. We have to be, in my opinion, have to be looking at solutions that can do multiple things. And so what this has done, this solution, it's challenged us, it's challenged our investigators, it's challenged our logistics, our supply chains to think differently about what else we can do. And to me, I don't think you asked me why, but that's the why. Why did we partner with you? Why are we doing what we're doing? Because, yes, we challenged you guys, but you've also challenged us to think differently about the value of a device and what it can do across our supply chain, all full scope. And to me, that's the unlock and game changer of this.
[Guy Yehiav] And we believe that there's actually even more business use case, and we continue to explore it.
[Sammy Kolt] That's good. That's my job. Right? We need to look for more applications, more use cases, and, you know, it's an honor to work with, companies like Luxottica to find and to make sure, that we build these applications. So really quickly about the solution, SmartSense Voyage, is really an integrated solution, both hardware and software together, that helps kind of in all these use cases that we talked about.
It's got capabilities for tracking the assets, whether it's GPS, or cellular triangulation. We talked a little bit about areas where there's issues getting location or accurate location. We still find location using cellular triangulation. Connectivity is fully cellular. Right? So it's an independent device that can communicate all over the world. Right? It doesn't care where it is. It doesn't care what network. You don't care what network. It's all seamless to you.
[Guy Yehiav] And Sammy, just to add, because of that you don't need high-cost infrastructure.
[Sammy Kolt] Correct.
[Guy Yehiav] Because you have everything in that one credit card size.
[Sammy Kolt] Correct. Right. Again, everything is built on our proven, scalable cloud. We've been, this is a new innovation for us. Right? But we've been, for multiple years, operating in the asset protection and asset monitoring space with very large companies. So we're already leveraging this scale for the product. I do want to talk a little bit about this little device that we have. So again, ultra-low-profile form factor. Mike was talking about that. We wanted to create something that can be used in multiple applications. So again, size of a credit card, little thicker than two credit cards. And it can be put anywhere you want, right, because of the size of it. I mentioned the cellular communication, very accurate location capabilities, the ability to have a flexible interval configuration, which means that you can get data from the device in different intervals. Right? So in some applications, you want it at every five minutes. In other applications, you want it maybe once a day or twice a day, which means that it will prolong the life of that sensor and will allow you to cover that use case for longer. Again, store-and-forward capabilities, battery life monitoring, buttonless activation, that really helps with, there's no button that a user need to press in order to activate the set. All the activation is based on the use case and in the software. So great innovation.
[Guy Yehiav] Thank you, Sammy. And the buttonless, I think that is critical for scale. So when we talked about so many people in the warehouse, so many people on the trucks, you have a lot of people. If they forget to press a button, you don't want to suddenly [say], “Hey, I don't know where my stuff is because no one pressed it.” Well, it's buttonless. It's all automatically activated when it moves, and takes the data into the into the system. Now, if you want to learn more , we are actually doing a promotion with Retail Orphanage Initiative, ROI. And for every new activated sensor that we'll have here in our booth, we are donating another $50, which equates to a full year of clean water or a Retail Orphanage Initiative kid in 3rd world countries. So please come by our booth, 3263. It's next to stage 1. Put us on stage 5 so we can actually lose some calories walking. But please come by the booth. We'll activate a sensor for you so you can use it and continue to generate and start generating value through those different business cases. Thank you for having us today. Thank you for coming.
