Welcome to this episode of The New Warehouse Podcast, where Kevin chats with Guy Yehiav, President of SmartSense by Digi. In this conversation, Yehiav explains how SmartSense is redefining supply chain visibility by moving beyond reports and dashboards to deliver real-time, actionable insights.
Drawing on experience across healthcare, food, retail, and logistics, he introduces the concept of micro visibility in the supply chain. He explains how combining condition monitoring with location intelligence helps organizations prevent waste, protect people, and reduce cargo theft before problems escalate.
Why Visibility Alone Falls Short
For years, supply chains have focused on collecting data, but that data often arrives too late to matter. Yehiav explains that traditional visibility relies heavily on reports, which leave too much room for interpretation and delay. “If I share with you an Excel spreadsheet and I share it with five others, people would take different takeaways from those spreadsheets because people read numbers differently.”
Instead of surfacing issues after the fact, SmartSense focuses on identifying exceptions as they happen and guiding teams on what to do next. Yehiav emphasizes that alerts should drive action, not confusion. “When you send the excursion, don’t just send a bunch of reports or Xs on an app, send actually what you actually found.” By embedding SOPs and decision paths into alerts, SmartSense helps teams respond faster and with greater confidence.
Defining Micro Visibility in the Supply Chain
The concept of micro visibility emerged from healthcare and pharmaceutical customers facing a critical problem: they could see shipments only after something went wrong. Yehiav describes this gap clearly. “They said, listen, it’s a black box. It’s a 3PL; we ship it, and they provide tracking. But it’s, it’s delayed. It’s not in real time.”
Micro visibility changes by delivering real-time insight into both condition and location. Yehiav explains the shift in mindset: “Can you actually give us information in real time? Tell us where it is. Tell us what to do to prevent that failure from happening, and that’s the micro visibility that we talked about.”
By detecting temperature excursions, delays, or route deviations as they occur, organizations can intervene before products are lost, spoiled, or rendered unusable.
Micro visibility is the ability to monitor movable assets in real time, so organizations know where a shipment is, what condition it’s in, and can act immediately to prevent failures, rather than discovering problems only after delivery.
Preventing Waste and Cargo Theft Before It Happens
Micro visibility also plays a growing role in cargo theft prevention, where small losses often go unnoticed until it’s too late. Yehiav compares supply chain risk to cybersecurity, noting that vulnerabilities often lie far upstream. “In supply chain, it’s very much like cybersecurity. You are as strong as the last chain.”
SmartSense detects subtle signals, such as changes in light, pressure, or movement, that indicate tampering. These early warnings matter because partial theft is harder to trace. “The issue comes when you take one pallet, or you take a few cases, and no one notices totally.” By identifying anomalies in real time, teams can pinpoint where losses occur and respond before small gaps become major financial or safety risks.
Key Takeaways on Micro Visibility in the Supply Chain
- Micro visibility in the supply chain enables real-time intervention, not after-the-fact reporting.
- Combining condition monitoring with location data helps prevent spoilage, waste, and theft.
- Actionable alerts tied to SOPs reduce ambiguity and speed decision-making.
- Partial losses often go undetected without real-time anomaly detection.
- Supply chains are only as resilient as their least visible link.
