EP 41
How LAPD Recovered $1.13M Stolen Goods in Under 7 Minutes Using Decklar
Available On
Guests:
-
William McKinzie
Director of Safety & Security -
Tony
Head of Security Operations, APL Logistics
In this episode we learn how APL Logistics has seen significant improvements by leveraging real-time visibility, data-driven insights, and enhanced security. From streamlining operations and reducing costs to boosting customer satisfaction, the impact has been clear. One of the most compelling examples of Decklar (formerly Roambee) effectiveness was how it helped APL recover $130k worth of goods and uncover $1M in stolen inventory from other companies. This article explores how these innovations are redefining security and supply chain management.
Behind the Mic: This Month’s Supply Chain Tech Recap
With decades of combined experience managing security across global 3PL operations, William and Tony share a compelling story: a $130k security incident that exposed over $1 million in stolen inventory, led to law enforcement intervention in seven minutes, and revealed that real-time visibility is as much an operational tool as it is a security measure. We explore how visibility at the cargo level—not just the truck—changes everything from risk prevention to operational efficiency, why adopting the right technology matters less than adopting it the right way, and how to scale visibility as a competitive advantage across customer relationships
Key Takeaways
Visibility at the Cargo Level Changes Everything
Traditional GPS tracks trucks. Decklar tracks shipments. This distinction matters: when cargo is separated from the tractor (theft, theft, mishandling), you lose visibility with traditional systems. Embedded tracking catches anomalies in real time, enabling intervention before loss occurs.
One Incident Exposes Systematic Risk
The Southern California theft ring was targeting specific warehouses across the region. APL’s response—investing in monitoring and protocol improvements—reflects a broader industry realization: cargo theft is organized, evolving, and requires proactive detection, not reactive investigation
Operational Insights Are the Real ROI
Beyond security, Decklar’s visibility unlocked performance metrics: lane efficiency, dwell times at ports, vendor compliance, temperature/humidity excursions, and ETA accuracy. APL now makes planning decisions on data, not estimates.
Adoption Hinges on Simplicity and Measurable Impact
APL rejected reusable GPS devices (reverse logistics burden) and fragmented provider solutions (reporting nightmares). They chose disposable units with integrated analytics. Result: faster deployment, clearer ROI, organic adoption across teams.
Scaling Visibility Becomes a Competitive Advantage
APL’s strategic vision: make Decklar a standard customer offering, not an add-on. This consolidates what used to require 5-7 systems into one platform, reducing customer costs while deepening relationships through transparency and reliability.
Empowered Frontline Teams Detect Patterns Faster
Pattern recognition—understanding which lanes were targeted, which carriers had anomalies—came from teams analyzing historical data. When security and operations collaborate with clean data, threats are caught proactively, not after the fact.
Scott Mears
Has overall security awareness improved within your team since the incident?
William McKinzie
I’m going to give that one two thumbs up.
Scott Mears
Do you think the most supply chains are currently well protected against security breaches?
William McKinzie
I’ll go thumbs down. I’ll probably have to say thumbs down.
Scott Mears
Is LA traffic more bearable than Alabama’s humidity? Thumbs down.
William McKinzie
I’ll go thumbs down. I’ll go thumbs down.
Scott Mears
Welcome to the Supply Chain Tech Podcast with Decklar. Scott Mears here, Senior Marketing Manager at Decklar and your host. We thank you for joining us today. In this episode, we speak with Willie McKenzie, Director of Safety and Security, and Tony, Head of Security Operations at APL Logistics, part of the KWE Group. We uncover how APL Logistics used Decklar’s B-Label to recover $130,000 in goods and expose $1 million in stolen inventory from other companies. We also explore the solutions and technologies they tried before, which failed to close the security gaps and how Decklar made the difference. You will learn how Decklar drives execution and planning decisions with real-time verifiable data and key ROI metrics to boost both operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. Finally, we explore the key pillars every company should be adopting to combat organized theft. Welcome, Tony. Welcome, Will. I’m really happy to have you guys on the podcast today.
Tony
Okay, thanks, Scott.
William McKinzie
Appreciate you having us on. Yeah, thank you, Scott. We definitely appreciate the opportunity to be here with you.
Scott Mears
Yeah, we appreciate you guys coming on. I know we’ve got quite an interesting story to dive into today. And before I jump to that, I always like to kick off the episode with a fun icebreaker. And as security is going to be the mainstay of the subject today, I’d be really interested to know from actually both of you, starting with you, Will first, is if you could sit down with anyone, dead or alive, to discuss today’s security risks in supply chain, who would you be choosing and why would you be choosing that person, Will?
William McKinzie
Yeah, that’s actually a great icebreaker question there, Scott. For me, and this is going to be crazy for Yank to say it, but Winston Churchill. You look at what he did for the security of the UK and the Commonwealth prior to World War II. He was banging the drum for security issues and looking at collaboration across multiple countries for security. And I kind of look at his leadership example of how he led them through that crisis. It was a world stage crisis at that point. But for me, with modern security, it would be looking at how do we take some of those innovative ideas and how to lead the people into a multi-market segment, where you’re building that coalition versus just one isolated company doing it. So that’s where I would really want to kind of look at him and pick his brain on how do we go forward with this? How do you build those, coalesce that strategy together across the board, across multiple different companies, and how he was able to do it across multiple countries. I think it would easily transition back to the corporate world as well. It kind of defaults back to one of the quotes from the World Crisis Volume 1 that he put in there was, eating bread is soon forgotten, dangers which are warded off by effective precautions and foresight are never even remembered. And that’s where we really want to get to, is that we’re driving the technology and innovation piece forward. We don’t even want it to be remembered at the end of the day because we’ve been able to stop cargo theft. So, I’d rather us preemptively strike it versus looking at it on the back end. And I think that’s currently where most of our industries at, is kind of playing catch up on the back end with the criminals currently.
Scott Mears
That’s a great answer. It’s a really wonderful answer. And you can actually, interestingly, in London, you can actually see his bunker where he used to strategize. You can actually see his original plans, his war room. So you could actually, maybe you could get connected to him in some way by going to his war room in London and see if maybe you’ll get some learnings from there. But I love that answer. And for you, Tony, who would that be?
Tony
Yeah, I think looking back on history, I’d have to say Robert McNamara would probably be one of the people that I’d be most interested in speaking to. Obviously, during the height of the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis, there was a lot of geopolitical issues going on around the world that the U.S. was having to deal with and keep our economy going. And looking at the complexity of that issue, not just at face value, but diving into the deeper ramifications of every decision that was made at the time, that would be a super interesting conversation that I’d love to get all the backstory to and see how they were able to handle those complex issues and keep America and the rest of the Western world thriving.
Scott Mears
Wow, two powerful leaders you’ve both chosen there. And I’m sure it would be quite a dinner if you were to get them round a round table. I’m sure they’ve got some stories to tell. And I think that really sets the scene with what we’re diving in today. We’re going to be really diving into quite a serious security story. But before we do get there, I want to understand first is, what were the challenges that you were facing that encouraged you to even try Decklar? What were those challenges? What are those patches that you were trying to overcome in APL logistics? And I’ll ask Will.
William McKinzie
Yeah, yeah, thanks, Scott. Yeah, so for us, it was kind of a, it hit a multitude of factors at one point in time. So we originally started looking at Decklar for the GPS solution piece, looking at the security, how to offset some cargo theft issues we were seeing globally. But once we got more into delving into what Decklar could offer, obviously our scope expanded from there. You know, we were siloed in security, the thinking mentality of, okay, it’s a GPS, we’re going to track our freight. We’re going to know where our freight’s at. We’re going to know if it’s stolen. It goes from point A to point B. We can work on recovery at that end. But once we got into seeing the suite of goods and offerings, the technology piece that Decklar brings to the table, we were actually able to bring it back into the operations sphere. So we busted the bubble, you know, kind of that we busted through the ceiling of security. And we started looking at how this can help us operationally? So we started looking, you know, specifically at contractual language. Around GPS, we were seeing that from some of our customers. And then we were also starting to bring in the need for the increase of metadata around shipments, location data, port data. And once we realized Decklar had all of these other offerings built in, it really drove us to focus on their products solely at that point.
Scott Mears
That’s interesting. And sort of adding to that, you know, you’ve got to Decklar now, you’ve identified where Decklar can play a part. Before Decklar was introduced or came onto the scene, for you, Tony, what were those solutions that you maybe you evaluated in the past? You don’t necessarily have to drop names, but I’m just interested in maybe the strengths or weaknesses you found of the solutions in the past and maybe why they didn’t fully solve the challenges or maybe solve some of the challenges. How was that experience prior to Decklar and why you felt they didn’t quite complete all those challenges for you guys?
Tony
Sure. Yeah, you know, obviously there’s some major providers out there. And one of the critical things that we were looking at is as we’re managing global shipments, a lot of times we’re doing it either, obviously we’re a 3PL company, but we’re doing it on behalf of our customers and we’re not necessarily going to be receiving it on the front end or the back end physically. One of the challenges that we saw was being able to handle the front end and back end logistics of getting the devices from point A to point B to make sure that they’re there for installation. But more importantly, on the back end, having an efficient and non-burdensome manner of returning the devices. A lot of the companies that we looked at were using reusable GPS assets that would have to be cycled out throughout their supply chain. And it kind of made it more complicated because a lot of the times, you know, it’s going from customer A’s origin facility to customer A’s distribution center, wherever the destination ends up being. And we’re not necessarily hands-on at the point of destination. So, it’d be more difficult and burdensome for our customers to have to deal with getting the devices back to the companies. When we explored your solution, one of the things I loved was the disposable tracking solutions and how much capability that adds to our offering in that we won’t have to deal with the back-end logistics of returning the devices. Obviously, a lot of the time, you’re going to only have a certain number of devices available in your ecosystem. So that could present a logistical challenge in making sure that we have the devices available for our customers to add the most benefit. And then as Will kind of expanded on, one of the capabilities that you guys have out of the box that was kind of more complex to build on the back end is the reporting metrics. So for us, security is traditionally seen as a 100% spend business unit. And we like to try to bring as much value back to the company as possible. And one of the things that your guys’ offering has is a lot of technology and reporting analytics built in that really adds operational value to the operation and allows the customer to be 100% aware and their supply chain have 100% visibility from origin all the way through destination. And then also being able to really get a grasp on certain choke points throughout the supply chain that they can make their supply chain more efficient.
Scott Mears
Interesting. So what I take from that is you wanted to get away from that maintenance of the physical IoT devices, the reverse ops, that’s always one we hear and definitely a key challenge that has dealt with. And also the reporting piece, which I think a lot of people missed initially in the initial conversations, they don’t think of the folks on the track and they focus on the technology that takes, that will provide them with this data, but they don’t realize how much value that can provide to them in a good reporting tool that can actually dive into and dissect all the key KPIs and ROI pieces for your particular business. So I think that’s really interesting that you’re bringing these points out and definitely something we hear as well. And now I wanna sort of get into, so we’ve identified the key challenges, sort of the solutions you’ve tried.
I kind of wanna now narrow it down into the specific use case for you guys. So we know it’s a security use case, but maybe Will, could you just articulate a bit more what the use case is for you guys? And then we’ll dive into this interesting story that really shows the value of this application for you guys.
William McKinzie
Yeah, so for our use case for this one, obviously, as you said, Scott, it came out of the security realm. We started noticing, as I alluded to before, several incidents of cargo theft that were taking place. We’d already engaged with Romeby for a couple of contractual items that we were looking at prior to this. And it just happened that this one site, we started seeing multiple of the same type of theft coming out of it, cargo theft issues. And from there, it just really, we decided to just go ahead and use that as our white paper use case that we were gonna present out to our executive staff. And it just, it happened to work out, everything lined up perfectly during the white paper that we were able to actually make some prosecutorial arrest off of it. And I’ll let Tony pick it up from there. He was the lead investigator on this case. And he has a lot of insight into how it went from there.
Tony
Yeah, so we actually, we’ve been seeing an increase, and I think this isn’t just us, it’s the industry as a whole. Through the Southern California area, there’s been a significant increase in cargo theft. And this particular facility is in the Inland Empire area of Southern California. And we started getting some reports of some missing or shorted shipments. Ended up doing a deeper dive and identifying some patterns related to the incidents that were taking place. It just so happened again, that we’re in the trial phase with your guys’ product and your company. And once we were able to identify the pattern, we deployed some of the disposable GPS units into some of the loads. And on the second load, we did notice an anomaly for the route deviation. We ended up getting some alerts related to the light and other sensors that were in the device. That led me to contact the local cargo theft task force. And we ended up getting a hold of the cargo at a kind of a makeshift warehouse, I guess you would say. And the police department ended up hitting the location on a search warrant, ended up recovering our product, which was still untouched in the trailer. But then during the search warrant, we ended up recovering not only additional goods from the facility related to prior theft incidents, but also over a million dollars worth of other product that was from other customers in that same area. And it became clear that this particular criminal organization was targeting specific warehouses in that area and kind of just going a free for all. And that’s something that we’ve seen with a lot of, you know, the cargo theft operations now have become significantly more sophisticated through identity theft. And I believe that this product will be instrumental in helping prevent future thefts and also secure our customers’ cargo so that we can ensure it gets from point A to point B untouched, unharmed. And, you know, we’re able to keep our brand reputation and brand recognition at a good, acceptable level and make sure that our customers are able to get the product to their customers in a timely manner. And be able to, you know, ultimately make revenue on the backend.
Scott Mears
Absolutely. And it just blows my mind when you realize it’s a million dollars’ worth of value in that warehouse. And, you know, maybe many more warehouses. It’s pretty, pretty, a substantial amount of stock. And I know those three alerts you were mentioning is the shipment deviated from the route, which was an instant trigger to the control tower. The shipment stopped for 20 minutes when it wasn’t supposed to. And then the door also noticed the light sensor. So it was also opened when it wasn’t supposed to. So suddenly that’s a lot of red flags. And if I’m not mistaken, the LAPD was there within seven minutes, which I must say that’s pretty impressive. So well done to the LAPD there. Yeah, it’s phenomenal. It’s just a really, I mean, it’s kind of maybe crazy that that happened whilst we were just running, you know, a POV, you know, that’s kind of just crazy how life happens sometimes. But, you know, good that it’s been caught. And I kind of want to know first, starting with you, Will, is how did you just feel after that instant immediately? I mean, I don’t know if you guys have faced this before in the past, so maybe it’s just, oh, well, it happens. Was this a new thing for APL Logistics?
William McKinzie
No, no, unfortunately it wasn’t. I mean, and I think it’s an industry-wide thing that we’re a trend we’re seeing, you know, and I will say that, you know, here in the United States, we’re fairly lucky when it comes to cargo theft. You know, we deal with the non-violent side of cargo theft, where other parts of the globe that we work in, we see the more violent side of it, where it’s hijackings and kidnappings that go along with it. So for this one, you know, I was, you know, I’m not going to say I was relieved, but I was very, I was shocked. But I was relieved that we did have the Romeby unit on there. And we were able to, you know, at the end of the day, you know, work with law enforcement and the cargo theft recovery team. And I’m able to make a, you know, prosecution at the end of the day for this. Because as Tony said, they weren’t only hitting our customer, they were also hitting other businesses around us, which were large food and beverage businesses as well. So it’s a pretty common thing we’re seeing today. But for me, it really, you know, I was relieved to see that we had, you know, we had a product and we had a unit on there that was working and it worked to specification at the end of the day. You know, it wasn’t about the hype from what Romeby, the sales folks had tried to tell us. We put it to use and we actually made a difference at that point. So the relief was on that end for me, once we had that in place.
Scott Mears
And for you, Tony, what was that immediate feeling after the incident once it happened?
Tony
Yeah, I definitely think it was a good moment, definitely for our security team and that the countermeasures that we are implementing are working. And a lot of times in the criminal realm, you’re playing a kind of a cat and mouse game where, you know, you implement policies or procedures that you feel would be best to mitigate the risk and the criminal organizations will find a way around it. And in this case, we were able to stay, you know, one step ahead and successfully interdict the criminal activity. You know, as these operations continue, they’re definitely going to continue to evolve. You know, it’s a billion dollar industry for them. So it’s a constantly evolving dynamic that we’re having to deal with. But I think that adding technology and pieces like this are going to be crucial in securing the landscape in the future and allowing us to continue to be successful to give our customers the absolute best service that we can and making sure that their product gets from point A to point B successfully.
Scott Mears
100%, that’s great, Teeran. And I’m interested, I mean, of course, how you have faced this, and it seems like quite a big challenge that a lot of companies face. But do you feel this has influenced your security protocol in any way? Or is this sort of, no, we carry on and, you know, this happens? And would you say this incident has influenced your protocol in some ways?
William McKinzie
Yeah, I would say this has definitely influenced our security protocols in several ways, Scott. You know, we really took a big look at where we currently were at. You know, Tony and I both are fairly new to APL. I’m two years at the company. Tony is a little over a year now, getting close to a year and a half, I believe, with the company. So that was one of our big driving factors when we started was looking at how can we help to improve these trends that we’re seeing in the security space when it comes to cargo theft. But looking at it, it’s truly, you know, we’ve looked at multiple ways to expand our security protocols. You know, obviously with Decklar, we’re looking at enhanced monitoring. You know, we’re getting real-time alerts. We’re getting the data analytics on the back end. Awesome surveillance technology at the end of the day. We’re also looking, you know, kind of a shifting space there. We’re looking at the physical aspect of it. Some stricter access controls to our sites. We’re looking at potentially some gate automation that marries in with a couple of different systems as well to help offset some of this driver data and faults data we’re seeing from broker boards and double-brokered or triple-brokered loads. And then on top of that, we’re really looking at trying to drive the back-end piece, the human piece with improved training. Because at the end of the day, if we’re not giving our employees the proper training of what to look for in these types of security issues that we’re seeing, you know, we’re failing as a corporation if we’re not. So that was another big piece that we implemented this past year. I was trying to drive it back to the boots-on-the-ground mentality of, hey, you’re the first-line employee. You’re seeing this. You know, when you see something, say something at the end of the day. If it looks like it’s off, it probably is off. Let’s do some investigation before we just give them our cargo and let them, you know, leave our lot with it.
Scott Mears
That’s really good, Tia. You know, and I think, you know, I was going to follow up a question, but I really feel you answered it, you know, between you and Tony with, you know, additional training, using new innovation technology to keep ahead of these organizations and really just keeping ahead of them with understanding the patterns. Like I know you mentioned, Tony, about analyzing the patterns prior, where you started recognizing these particular lanes were of interest. So it seems like these are very much the key pillars of what any company needs to be doing to keep an eye on this and stay ahead. And also hearing from you both, it sounds like they’re very well-organized and they work at quite a fast speed as well. So it’s, I know, a constant challenge, but it seems like there’s some key learnings here for companies to implement for, to overcome this in the future and keep ahead of it. Now, I want to move more into sort of the overall impact the solution of Renby is having on your supply chain operations. I wouldn’t really understand like the ROI, you know, every company is unique and, you know, the ROI metrics can be different. And I’d be interested hearing from you, Tony, is what’s the impact and ROI you’ve seen from the deployment for your organization? And if there are some ROI metrics, you can let us know, but that’d be really interesting for us.
Tony
Yes, absolutely. So from the operation side, one of the key tenants of our business is visibility for our customers, right? So one of the big challenges that’s been, you know, historical in the supply chain is having visibility from origin to destination. And, you know, it’s been difficult with some of the past technology or not the lack of availability of some of the real-time technology and having to, you know, connect multiple data streams. But in this particular instance, I think it’s really beneficial for us with the out-of-the-box solution that Renby comes with, with the predictive ETA capabilities, the route performance capabilities. It really gives our customers visibility to one real-time monitor all of their shipments across the globe. And then two, have visibility into the performance of their supply chain. Things like that are invaluable because a lack of efficiency is a lack of revenue, essentially. And the more we can make our customers and our supply chain more efficient, the more money that the customer and our company is ultimately going to make. And, you know, being able to satisfy the customer needs on their side to make sure that they have their product available. You know, a lot of the inventory strategies have gone to the just-in-time inventory model. So it’s crucial that when we say that the cargo is going to get there, the cargo is going to get there. And they, you know, forecast their shipments and models based off of that type of inventory management solution. So having the ability to have the real-time access to all the data points within the supply chain is crucial. And then on the security side, obviously risk management is something that is huge for us. And while it’s great to have these successful interdictions, our ultimate end goal is to prevent them before they happen. So if we can have a situation where we achieve 100% success rate, where we don’t have any security-related issues, that’s a world where, you know, Will and I sleep the best. While that’s something that we strive for every day, obviously there’s challenges related to that. But adding technology like this allows us to be more confident that we’re able to handle our customer shipments with the utmost care. And it’s going to arrive in the manner which it’s supposed to arrive contractually. And we get it there when we say we’re going to get it there.
Scott Mears
And just adding to your answer there, are there any specific sort of ROI points you would say or metrics that you’d focus in on within the data that you’re getting through your visibility solutions?
Tony
Yeah, I think one of the great things is with the kind of the ability to leverage the data within the platform, obviously, you know, before you can have visibility into one shipment, but having the availability of the historical data and being able to analyze that throughout your entire ecosystem is something that’s very beneficial for our organization. You know, we’ll be able to tell, hey, if there’s a certain lane that’s not performing well, what alternative can we provide to the customer that’ll be a better performing route for them to make sure that we’re able to get their shipments when they expect them. Another thing related to that is compliance, right? So some of our product has to have specific temperature or humidity regulations to make sure the integrity of the product is intact upon arrival. And with the sensors that Decklar deploys, we’re able to monitor that from origin to destination. And if there’s any issues within a particular location or by a specific vendor, we can handle those proactively and also report that back to the customer on the backend to make sure that we reduce significantly any claims on the backend for damaged product, any lost goods claims. And then also kind of look at the vendor management aspect of are these vendors performing to their contractual obligation? And if not, what alternatives can we explore to make sure that we’re getting the product to them in the way that they expected so that they’re able to get their product to their customer in an efficient manner?
Scott Mears
That makes so much sense. And I love that you’re focusing on all these areas as well, the data. And it does seem that historical data is quite important for APL. And analyzing those patterns. And it seems like you’ve even got an opportunity to move towards a digital twin. I see a lot of value in this in the future of how you’re speaking around really analyzing the data and understand which lanes are gonna be more effective than others to improve customer satisfaction. So that’s really exciting. That’s really exciting to see that you’re gonna really harness the information there combined with the information you get from other sources. That’s really exciting. That’s what brings it to life. So it’s just fantastic to hear the way you speak on this. And for you, Will, I would like to also get quite specific on what would you say are the types of planning and execution decisions that the deployment has helped improve or you’d see it further helping in the future?
William McKinzie
Yeah, so for me, looking at planning and execution, kind of the high level here at APL Logistics, one of the big things is, we’ve touched on and you brought on is our customer. As a 3PL, it’s all we can do to help their business grow, to help their business succeed. And that’s where this has really helped us in the planning phase where we can sit down with our customers. As you touched on the real-time visibility of the different lanes or dwell times at your port or port stoppages, or even at the end of the day, when we look at looking at business threatened events, if we’re seeing something that’s happening on one lane, we’re gonna plan that out for future with the customers. And at the end of the day, it’s the execution piece. Driving technology into it, it really helps with the efficiency and execution. We’re not seeing a second from normal human mistakes. And it also really lets us look outside and really push our employees instead of siloing them. We can push them across the board at that point and make them more efficient where they’re working with multiple customers. And then look at data across the board that way as well.
Scott Mears
This is good to hear and good insight for our listeners as well. I love getting into the specifics of the ROI, of the planning and the execution decisions that it’s impacting. And I feel, I was gonna ask a question around customers, but I feel we have answered a lot around this and how it’s impacting customer satisfaction. You know, the lanes, even you are going even as detailed as analyzing the vendors, which is really great to see that comparison. You have all that data there, which is of course can have a great impact on customer satisfaction as well. I feel, sticking with you Will for a moment is, where do you see this scaling in the future? And why do you see it scaling there in the future?
William McKinzie
Yeah, so for me looking kind of future state of the system here, obviously, I would love to scale it across all the customers at APL. Kind of my strategic vision is that we look at this as a standard offering that becomes part of our package going forward with our customers. Because it not only builds, like we said, into the security realm, it looks at multiple other data points that historically or traditionally haven’t been seen out of one company’s technology piece at that point. So I think this is really the game changer to where we’re able to bring in multiple aspects of technology that we would traditionally have, two, three, upwards of five to seven systems, and we can bring it all back into one system at that point. And again, I’ve touched on the customer satisfaction piece big time, but when we’re saving them money because we’re not having to employ seven to eight different systems to look at one route and monitor it, and we can do it to one system, we’re saving them money on the backend and we’re saving our company money as well. And for scalability, that’s where I see it going. That’s my strategic vision since day one, since we were able to do the white paper trial and we had the good luck with the successful raid there and able to find the cargo. And then looking at the backend, it really, Decklar’s product really set the bar for me going forward, especially when I’m dealing and looking with other customers or vendors that are coming in and then really pushing that piece out to our customers to get them bought in and the same idea from what we’ve seen internally, we wanna push it to them so they can see the same effects and the same reactions that we’ve gotten with Decklar.
Scott Mears
That’s really great to hear. I love that you’re even going as far as adding it as an offering as well for your customers. I think that’s fantastic.
And there’s a lot of value here. And shooting to you, Tony, I would love to know, what would your advice be to other companies that are facing these security issues and thinking about investing in some real-time visibility solution? What would your advice be for them?
Tony
Yeah, so I think definitely on this particular issue, a lot of the GPS solutions that are deployed right now based on the truck location or container location, they’re not actually embedded in the cargo itself, which I think is something that’s very critical because if there were to be a security incident, you lose visibility as soon as the shipment is separated from either the tractor or the trailer. That’s something that’s really valuable that Decklar brings to the table. And then on the backend of it is, obviously, cargo theft is gonna be, based on the trends that we’re seeing, it’s gonna be a continual problem with supply chain management. And it’s not going away. Unfortunately, you could see that it’s continuing to trend up. And we, as an industry, need to come up with innovative solutions to solve some of these issues so that we’re able to curb some of the incidents that are occurring. And with that, on the operational side, one of the really great enhancements that real-time visibility brings is a lot of times you’re just looking at the, you’re looking at your supply chain as an overall lane. So if I have lane A and lane B, I’m just monitoring the time it takes to get from point A to point B within that particular route. One thing that’s great with this particular product is rather than just looking at an overall time, you’re able to break down time specific to certain points or milestones within your supply chain. So if I know that route A has been experiencing a significant delay, rather than trying to go through and identify manually where that delay may be occurring, I can draw immediate conclusions based on specific data points with real-time data that I’m able to leverage very easily. I don’t need to be a Power BI expert to go through and try to make reports. All these reporting features are out of the box, ready to go. And it’s really easy for you to identify, if we’re having a certain issue with dwell times at a specific location, I can drill into that and find out the root cause rather than just trying to analyze that total, maybe if it’s an ocean shipment, that total 28-day period to find where exactly the delay is occurring within my supply chain. Just having that information available at your fingertips to leverage is something that’s valuable now, but as data management and AI becomes at the forefront of the industry, it’s going to be something that you’re able to leverage with extreme precision to be able to make your operation more efficient.
Scott Mears
I like that extreme precision. That is a strong tagline. It’s a very strong tagline. And I think what you’re saying there falls in line with what Will was saying with the vision about these dashboards. It’s a lot easier now, because in the past, you could have amazing innovation, amazing tech, but then dissecting the data can be quite challenging, quite exhausting in time constraints, having to be a Power BI expert or whatever other expert. But now we’ve seen that as well, especially moving into 2025, there’s a real dashboard fatigue. And we actually discussed this in our recent supply chain intelligence lab, which is our customer advisory board. And yeah, this is something we’re seeing. So it’s just interesting you guys are mentioning that as well. Noticing bringing it down to that one dashboard, that dashboard that is just clean, takes all the data, can present it in a manageable way where every job role can understand and see what they need to see is just so important and something we’re also seeing. Yeah, just wonderful to hear the sort of things and ideas that you at APL are already coming out with.
William McKinzie
I want to now- On this one, Scott, kind of for me on this one, if I could give any advice for executives that are looking for real-time visibility, if they’re looking at purchasing this for their corporation, I would say understand the needs of your company before you go out and look, because there’s so many different players on the market. Everybody offers something different. Truly understand what your corporation needs when you’re going out and looking. And we talk about, obviously, choosing the right technology. But for me, past that is when you finally decide on the company that you want to look at potentially going with, look at the accuracy of their data. That is the big thing for me. Because as Tony had touched on, and we didn’t go into specifics of other vendors when we were looking in this space, but there’s a lot that when you look at their data, it’s off. It’s not accurate at all. And that was one of the key factors for me, other than the trial with Rombie, was looking at the accuracy of your data that your company was able to provide. And it was spot on every time. There was nothing off. The GPS location wasn’t showing hundreds of miles away. It wasn’t even showing 25 miles off. It was showing very accurate within the location of where it’s supposed to be. And for me, that was a really big decision. And if I could give any advice to executives that are looking at real-time visibility solutions, those are my two big key pieces to look at.
Scott Mears
Great piece of advice. And absolutely. Again, that’s extreme accuracy and having that, knowing your why. Yeah, absolutely. We have all the innovations and solutions out there. Thank you for that, Will. And I want to finish up the episode with a fun thumbs up, thumbs down segment we like to do. If you could both just give me a big thumbs up or thumbs down on the camera. And also, yes, exactly. There we go. Will got it first time. And if you could also vocalize thumbs up or thumbs down for audio listeners, that would be wonderful. They’re very simple, yes or no questions. Maybe there’s some controversial ones in there. We’ll see. So we’ll dive in. We like some curveball. Do you feel ready for this section?
Tony
If there’s a controversial one, I might have some connectivity issues.
William McKinzie
You might take the middle of the road on that one, Tony.
Scott Mears
We like to test our guests on this section. So we’ll see how we get there. So number one, do you think similar operations are still occurring, being the operations that happened in the threat with the organized group, are still occurring in the modern supply chain today?
Tony
Thumbs up.
Scott Mears
Big thumbs up. And I think that’s been clear through the episode as well. Number two, has overall security awareness improved within your team since the incident?
William McKinzie
Can I give that one two thumbs up?
Scott Mears
You definitely can. Do you think that most supply chains are currently well-protected against security breaches?
William McKinzie
I’ll go thumbs down. I’ll probably have to say thumbs down.
Scott Mears
Thumbs down. Interesting, interesting. And would you recommend the Roam B5G B-Label to other companies with similar security challenges?
William McKinzie
Thumbs up, a double thumbs up on that one.
Scott Mears
Oh, that’s wonderful. And do you believe supply chain security issues are often overlooked in many companies?
William McKinzie
Thumbs up.
Scott Mears
Thumbs up, interesting. And finally, is LA traffic more bearable than Alabama’s humidity?
William McKinzie
Thumbs down.
Scott Mears
Oh, wow, interesting. So LA traffic is maybe not as bearable as Alabama’s humidity. Well, that’s wonderful. It’s great to have you both come on to the episode. I’ve really enjoyed this. I think it’s really important to showcase. Of course, we’ve learned throughout this episode, this isn’t just a single incident. This is happening, sadly, quite often to a lot of companies. It’s quite a large network. And we caught them this time. And we’re advancing in our conversations, in our innovations. And it’s just wonderful to see how you guys are approaching this as well. And I know our listeners are going to gain a lot of value from this conversation as well. And before we do finish off the episode, I want to make sure our listeners know where to find you guys. So just let the listeners know where they can find you, or if there’s anything you’d like to let them know about maybe a new innovation or project to APL Logistics, please, this is your time to let our listeners know what’s going on.
Tony
Yeah, absolutely. So APL Logistics is obviously on every social media platform. You can visit our website if you have any questions. For any marketing-related questions or any inquiries, you can go to global underscore marketing at apllogistics.com for the email. And we’ll be sure to respond to any inquiries that you have. You can also find me on LinkedIn as well through the APL company profile.
Scott Mears
Wonderful. And where can they find you, Will?
William McKinzie
Yeah, same goes for me as well. For the marketing email that Tony gave out. Also, you can find me on LinkedIn through APL and also through my personal LinkedIn if you’d like to reach out at Will McKenzie on LinkedIn.
Scott Mears
Brilliant. Thank you again for coming on to the episode. And if we just together give them a little wave, which I can see my hands barely visible through this screen, but we’ll try it anyway. Another wave. Goodbye.
Tony
Thanks for having us, Scott. We really appreciate it.
William McKinzie
Hey, thank you, Scott, so much for having us today. Thank you.
Scott Mears
Hi, my name is Scott Mears and I’m one of the hosts of the Supply Chain Tech podcast with Decklar. On this podcast, we talk to supply chain heroes from around the world about everything, ranging from the disruptions related to supply chains, their personal experiences with tracking technologies, strategies to build resilience and much, much more. We already have some recommended videos for you to the side of me. And if any of this sounds interesting to you, do subscribe to our YouTube channel and hit the bell icon so you don’t miss another Decklar video. I’ll see you next time.
Don't Miss Out!
Get the latest episodes delivered to your inbox