Q: Where did you source the idea to create Contguard?
A: My work and military experience, and what led me to create Contguard, is the understanding I have into the world of security.
Prior to founding Contguard, I led one of the leading security and private investigation firms in Israel and among other things, we secured military equipment convoys for the export defense industry. That kind of convoy demands highest levels of security and blockades along the road, but once we would get to the port, these containers would be loaded on the vessels and until they would reach destination they would be unprotected and not monitored.
That paradox just didn’t make sense to me! We immediately recognized the need and starting of course with defense industry we created Contguard.
Q: Why the shift to the shipping industry?
A: Shifting from the security industry to a hi-tech monitoring company came quite naturally. Once we recognized the need for a security and monitoring solution in the shipping industry, and realized that our knowledge and skills could easily be applied there, it made perfect sense.
Ultimately, we founded Contguard because we realized the unique experience we amassed could make a difference in cargo monitoring, and further, that our experience, team, and technology meant we could do it at a large scale. We quickly understood that our client’s main pain is the difficulty to manage unstructured data about their supply chain and we saw this as a unique opportunity.
Q: What problem does Contguard solve?
A: We find that the most pressing and common problems of our clients is efficiency and transparency. When you ship your products, there are so many blind spots as factors that you can’t realistically expect to control all of them. And that is what Contguard set out to do.
We realized that much of the concerns companies have could be solved if they simply knew more about their cargo. Our solution provides data analysis and real-time information that empowers executives to respond to conditions of uncertainty and anticipate constantly changing conditions to improve efficiency of their supply chain. Security is one important benefit but quality control by temperature for example is critical for industries such as food and pharma and transparency to improve supply chain efficiency which mostly affects medium-large companies.
Q: What industry needs to monitor their cargo the most?
A: It doesn’t matter if you are transporting sensitive medical equipment, cosmetics, chocolate or potentially dangerous weapons – everything needs to be monitored. Our clients get great benefits from all the information we provide them, but each of them have specific needs and our unique ability is the way we adjust based on the individual needs of our clients.
For example, our tobacco industry clients value security and supply chain transparency above many other factors while our pharma clients also care deeply about temperature and security. For the automotive sector, management and control of supply chain surpasses all other variables – it’s dynamic and we understand that and work with clients on their primary concern above all.
Q: What makes Contguard different in the monitoring business?
A: First of all, we are an end-to-end monitoring service. That means that we take care of the whole logistics around the monitoring devices. We provide our clients with ready-to-use units and we care about collecting them at destination. No one else does that in the monitoring business. Contguard not only provides alerts and raw data on your shipping, we provide in-depth analysis and important business analysis to our clients. And most important, we truly care about our clients and we work around the clock to make sure they always have the most accurate data and cutting-edge technologies, and best customer support.
Q: What does the future hold for Contguard?
A: Well, we will keep doing exactly what we are doing, just better! We are growing at a fast pace and we are continuously working on improving our technologies and developing our data analytics capabilities. And this is where we invest much of our efforts.