[Jesse J. Gross] The vision of East Coast Warehouse was started 70 years ago by the founder, and it was to become the best temperature-controlled warehouse company there is, and we live by our tagline of honesty, integrity and character in everything we do. We keep focus on the customer to build trust with them and to earn their business and to keep their business long-term.
I am the Senior Director of Facilities, and the main thing we always focus on is safety and compliance. Keeping the facility safe, the employees safe and food safety at the top of our list. So one of the major challenges with temperature control warehousing is having a warehouse that you know exactly what the temperatures are. So you know the product that you're storing is within compliance of a range of temperatures.
We were taking temperatures by hand. Keeping equipment calibrated was always, you know, a difficult struggle. And to keep that up to date. And then you weren't always sure if it was reliable or not. Our customers require a certain temperature range and that's what we stay focused on. So for food safety and reliability and quality, we focus on what the customer needs and keep it within that range.
When we initially looked at SmartSense, it seemed like the most logical and easy application for us. One, the sensors are magnetic, which works very well with our system because we could stick them to the racks and we could actually move them as we needed them. The website was very easy for us to use. You can log in, you can track, you can download data and you can run reports and you can even set up reports that are reoccurring, so you can get a weekly report, a monthly report and use that data which is very readily available.
But there is a labor savings there that can be allocated to different areas to focus on product handling or any other tasks that we have. SmartSense started at our Elizabeth campus, there's three facilities there totaling around 1,000,000 square feet and SmartSense is throughout those buildings. We are looking at GDP pharma certification and to do that we need to do temp mapping and temp monitoring. And we had four different sites that we had tent mapping to do which was two at Elizabeth and then also Savannah and then where we're at today, which is in Dayton, NJ.
The biggest thing it's used for daily is temp monitoring and ensuring that we keep consistent temperatures through all our controlled temperature areas. So if everything is running great, we probably don't even hear about it. And we have a site in Savannah with some higher fluctuations of temperature and humidity. You will get some spikes, but it's still within range because it is purposely built to keep that area at 65 as well. But you'll still have more range because of such a higher temperature variance. So we get the alert through SmartSense we acknowledge that alarm and then we can put in a corrective action immediately and we have HVAC techs on our sites all the time, so we can report that to them immediately, track that until completion and then put it back in the SmartSense to show that it has been completed.
So we actually just had a power outage here last week. A bad thunderstorm came through. We lost power. Not long, but SmartSense didn’t miss a beat. Everything was still reporting. Everything was recording because it's all battery backup. If we have to install new ones it's very simple. They are magnetic. They click right onto the rack. We can move them around if we need to put them higher, if we need to put ones by HVAC units, we can do anything we want with any configuration.
I think the biggest thing that we have since SmartSense was rolled out is just the consistency in our temperature monitoring. We know and understand our refrigeration systems better now than we did before, because with the continuous tracking we can see if there's historical events and know if maybe a compressor isn't running right or something isn't working and then we can put a corrective action in place to make that refrigeration system work as efficient as possible. It improved compliance because we are a SQF certified company and that is a high food safety certification, and having that ability to have a robust temperature monitoring system just helps us maintain that certification. Our food safety KPI is to get a 96% on our SQF audit annually and that is a badge of honor for us.
For all our customers we just went through our GDP pharma certification on it and when they saw the temp mapping and the layout of SmartSense, they absolutely loved it and helped us pass our certification. I think some of the bigger things are just ease of use. You don't want to put something in place that is difficult or hard to understand, and if you have other people that are running it, that might not have a background in facilities or an engineering background, you want something that's you can log on to the website easily understand it. You know, it's intuitive, you know, putting all the sensors on the racks. Very simple. Just like today. You know, I put a gateway out there. It took 3 minutes probably right to swap that. Out we actually just added new users and we had online training with our project manager and then I also did a separate online training as well. Ease of use is huge. How easy is it to install? How easy is it to maintain? How easy is it to get on the website, download material, get the data that you need? Because if it's too difficult and it's not working, it's not going to work.
I think the reliability of Smartsense overall is great. The partnership that we have built with SmartSense, if we need something we get it done very quickly. Our project manager and our project team is very responsive. So for example, our buildings are made out of a lot of steel and concrete and it can block the cellular signal. They will send us another gateway. With a different antenna structure, and that signal is coming through loud and clear. Now we're good to go. I'm happy with SmartSense. Just the partnership we have with them, the working relationship I have with our team, the ease of use, the actual sensors, the gateways, the process, how everything works, I think having SmartSense in place is Peace of Mind because you know it's going to work. You know it is working and it's just something that you don't have to worry about. Until you have an issue. But then when you have one, you know what's happening and you can correct it and make it work.
