LinkedIn with John Rippee

Steve Colantuoni

John Rippee is the Chief Operations Officer for Tecma Companies’ Secure Origins. SO is developing some very interesting that innovative technologies that have to do with border trade security. Hi John, how are you doing today?

John Rippee

Hi Steve, good to see you.

Steve Colantuoni

John, I hear you use the word, when you’re describing what it is that your company does, or, better said, the phrase, “preemptive intelligence.” What does that mean exactly in the context of what it is that you do?

John Rippee

Preemptive intelligence is the ability to know what’s going on in terms of border trade security before something bad happens, in layman’s terms. It’s an interesting concept and in that sense what we’re doing is absorbing a whole lot of GPS data from varying companies.

There are thousands of trucks moving from Mexico to the United States and in the reverse direction. In that sense what we’re doing running border trade security software in the background, and what it’s doing is taking a control group of secure companies and providing behavior pattern analysis on these particular trucks.

If a truck gets off a predetermined route, and goes to a particular location that it’s not supposed to be at, or something of that nature, we have a possible problem. It could also be as easy as the occurrence of a flat tire, and we’re unable to communicate with the driver, but GPS works everywhere. We know before something bad happens, and that it’s actually going to happen.

There are multiple levels of border trade security intelligence that exist out there for federal governments to be able to absorb. There’s things such as signal intelligence, human intelligence, and things of that nature. Human intelligence is you coming to me and telling me that there’s some sort of activity occurring in a certain location. What we’re doing is a variation on signal intelligence. We absorb information, and run it through a software program. Then we examine the data from a thousands of trucks being imported every single day, and analyze and understand where the problems are. The idea here is to get that product to market as quickly as possible, and to utilize capital assets that transportation companies have purchased as efficiently as possible.
If we have a control group, and we have a border trade security preemptive intelligence application running in the background, we know we have a trusted system. We know that that the drivers under examination haven’t done anything wrong, and we understand that everything has been secured along a particular route. We can help to move trade across the border much faster. The idea here is to save money and fuel.

If you’re not idling on a bridge for three hours that’s a tremendous improvement in the efficiency of use for commercial assets. If you can turn a truck from two times a day crossing a border to three times a day that’s a tremendous gain in efficiency. Oh by the way getting that product to market at a faster, more secure path is also very valuable.
We initiated a program that was we called Project 21. We then asked Customs and Border Protection (CBP) if we could send them our border trade security preemptive intelligence solution. They were very receptive to the idea.

One of their mandates is facilitation of trade, and they’re more than happy to implement technologies that are designed to do that. The project worked out fantastically, so CBP changed the name of their initiative to Project 21, as well, which was fantastic for us. We took a control group of right around one hundred trucks and applied our border trade security solution to them. We went from an average crossing time of seventy-six minutes.

This means that from Monday morning at 8 o’clock until Friday night at 11 o’clock all the bridge crossing times averaged seventy minutes for that control group. We were eventually successful in reducing that average down to twenty-twi minutes for that particular control group. The benefits of the technology are very clear when you start applying a border trade security preemptive intelligence solutions that result in transparency not only on the commercial side, but also for the government. For the first time we are able to understand secondary inspection rate impacts on an economic scale. Nobody had been able to do this before. Now we can start understand Department of Transportation (DOT) implications, CBP implications, Mexican Customs implications for all these inspections and apply economic numbers to them. Now we have a reliable baseline that we can move forward with. In five years, what I see happening is currently we rolled out first in El Paso- Ciudad Juarez region. We are now expanding into McAllen region as well as Laredo. In a period of five years, I see transparency becoming the new norm in border trade security, especially with this type of technology and its increasing application. It is pretty terrific. The other point I would like to make is that none of this technology is new. It’s the incorporation of existing technology. it’s very simply and proven already. It’s the way that we’re utilizing it for border trade security that makes it really unique.

Steve Colantuoni

My understanding is there’s a place that people can go on the internet and see real time data in terms of how long it’s going to take to cross a truck, tell us a little bit about that.

John Rippee

Yes, we approached a non-profit internet publication called the Newspaper Tree, and they were very receptive to publishing crossing times for commercial trucks. We’re providing that feed live now the their website at at www.newspapertree.com. We’re very excited about this. We want people to have the information that enables them to knowhow long it’s going to take a commercial truck to get across the border. We take the times, and provide holistic border trade security solution analysis for those crossing times.

Steve Colantuoni

Sure and if transportation personnel is looking at that the information everyday. That shipping company is going to get a sense of what they’re going to be able to do, and how fast it can be done.

John Rippee

For the first time you’re able to make an informed decision on where you’re going to send a truck, and we think that’s a good idea.

Steve Colantuoni

That’s a good idea. Is there anything else you’d like to add because I think anybody who has further questions can email you, but are there any last points you’d like to go over?

John Rippee

I would just share our vision, which is to facilitate trade in order to make the North American continent the most prosperous free trade center of the world. We’re going for greater the border trade security and transparency that will take us there.

Steve Colantuoni

And if that helps the economy, well, we could obviously all use it.

John Rippee

We think that’s great

Steve Colantuoni

Thank you

John Rippee

Thank you