Solutions by typeLogistics efficiency
Was that supposed to be opened right now?
A door open at an hour when it should not be
Mid-afternoon in the container block. On the bottom row, one door is open and the cargo in boxes is visible inside. Two people are standing by the opening. A truck goes past down the lane without slowing. That row has no operation scheduled today: no inspection order, no customs, no unloading. From the building it cannot be seen; through the camera it can — except that nobody has that camera in front of them.
6 cameras across 4 sectors
This is how you ask for it
«“Tell me if a container door in the block is opened outside operating hours.”»
If it is a job that was not written down, nothing happens and it closes in a minute with a phone call. If it is not, what is lost is not coming back: the goods go out through the gate and the gap turns up in next week’s stock count, when there is no longer anyone who can reconstruct what happened or at what time. And with a refrigerated container nothing even has to go missing: five minutes with the doors open and the power lead out of its socket, and the whole load is an insurance claim.
You decide once
What the organisation decides here is not who is allowed to open something: it is when something is expected to be opened. The operating hours of each block, the dosing windows of a tank, the shifts in which a switchboard is worked on, the number of minutes a reefer may stay open. All of that is already written down somewhere. Writing it once as a rule is what turns a camera that records into a camera that tells you.
Almost everything that gets opened outside its hours has a perfectly good explanation. A technician who brought a job forward, a shift that changed, an inspection that was logged wrong. So this is not about accusing anyone: nobody here is called suspicious, and nothing here tries to. It is about the explanation arriving now, in a thirty-second phone call, instead of in a week’s time, when nobody can give it any more.
The pure case is the container block. A door open on the bottom row in mid-afternoon, two people beside it and a truck driving past. Nobody in the building sees it, because a container block is a maze and the tower is looking at something else. But it is exactly the same as an electrical panel opened at eleven at night while the plant is running, or a mixing tank left uncovered outside its dosing window, or a custody cage open a minute too long. In all four places what fails is not the lock: it is that nobody was watching that camera.
IRIS watches the door and watches the clock. It sees that it is open, sees since when, and sees whether that hour fell inside the window the company had marked. When it does not, it says so, with the camera, the time and the video from just before, so that the person receiving it knows what they are looking at before they call. It identifies nobody, recognises no faces and does not say whether this is right or wrong. It says it is open and that today it was not due to be, and the rest is decided by whoever carries the responsibility.
What changes
Before, this was known through rounds and stock counts. The round comes when it comes, and the stock count arrives weeks later, when the only thing left to do is count what is missing. Now the open door is known while it is open, and what was an investigation becomes a phone call. And in a reefer, where the damage is done by time and not by anyone, an alert after five minutes is literally the difference between closing the door and throwing the load away.
Where we have seen it
CAM-444A container opened outside the working window
«Tell me if a container door is opened in the block outside operating hours.»
CAM-452A reefer with its doors open and the cable on the ground
«Tell me when a reefer has been more than five minutes with a door open or with its cable out of the socket.»
CAM-551It looks like routine maintenance, and it probably is
«Tell me when somebody spends more than five minutes in a cabinet aisle, and tell me since when they have been there.»
CAM-259A pallet heading out the door to a van
«Tell me if a pallet goes out the shipping door when no load is scheduled.»
CAM-216Somebody is tipping something into an uncovered tank
«Tell me if somebody opens a mixing tank or tips something in outside the hours when dosing is due.»
CAM-258An electrical panel open at eleven at night
«Tell me if anybody opens an electrical cabinet outside a scheduled intervention.»
What it does not do
IRIS identifies nobody, and does not need to: it recognises no faces, keeps no staff list and does not know whether that person had permission. Nor does it know what is inside the container or whether anything is missing: it sees that the door is open and since when. And it does not read your operations system unless it is connected to it; without that connection the expected hours are written by hand, and if the windows change every week, they have to be maintained.
Questions
- How does it tell a scheduled job from one that is not?
- By the time and the place, which is what the company has already written down. If block C operates from six to two, a door open at five in the afternoon is outside the window, and that gets flagged. If the work order can also be read from your system, the comparison gets finer and the number of alerts drops a lot. What IRIS never does is judge the person: it does not know who they are and does not try. It says something is open when it was not expected to be, and it is someone in the company who interprets that.
- Will this not flood the shift with false alerts?
- If the window is written badly, yes, and that is why it is tuned before going live. The first week usually serves for exactly that: you look at the alerts, discover that block C actually operates until half past three, and correct it. An alert that fires a hundred times and is nothing ninety-nine of them ends up switched off, and a switched-off rule protects nothing. That is why we prefer to start with a few well-written windows rather than many half-written ones.
- Does it work for a refrigerated container?
- Yes, and there the rule is different because the damage is done by time. What is watched is not only that the door is open, but how many minutes it has been like that, and whether the power lead is out of its socket, lying on the ground. Five minutes with the doors open in the reefer row already means a load at risk, and that is reported with the number of minutes up front. It does not measure the temperature inside: the container’s own probe is there for that. It sees what can be seen from outside, and it sees it the whole time.
- Does it keep the video of what happened before it opened?
- Yes. Every alert arrives with the clip from just before, and that is half the value. Seeing the door open says little; seeing the previous two minutes says whether a truck pulled up, whether they arrived with tools, or whether somebody left it like that on their way out. That is what turns an alert into a decision, and what means that if explanations are eventually needed, nobody has to search through hours of recording: the sequence is already saved with its timestamp.
Every simulation
Something has spilled
Tell me if there is liquid or foam outside its place and it is still there two minutes later.
- The sentence
- Where it applies
- What it finds
- The same rule
Not seeing yours here?
These words are the ones we have built, not the ones IRIS understands. The list falls short on purpose: you ask for it in a sentence, and sentences do not run out. Tell us what is in front of your cameras and we will tell you whether it understands it, or not yet.
And the best part
Video is late by definition:you watch it once the thing has already happened.
IRIS tells you while it is happening, with the camera, the time and what it saw. Arriving in time changes the end of almost any story, and no new cameras are needed for that.
Tell us your problem and we will say whether IRIS understands it, or not yet.
We reply the same working day.