We had shipments get completely unloaded, examined, and put into another trailer—and we couldn't see that until we started looking at the sensor data Tive trackers were capturing.
With 3.5 million Independent Beauty Consultants and $4 billion in global annual sales, Mary Kay Global has been a top global beauty brand and direct seller for 60 years in more than 35 markets worldwide. Mary Kay cosmetics and beauty products—including serums, retinol, foundations, and lipsticks, to name a few—are not only valuable (and thereby potential theft targets) but also extremely temperature sensitive. This fuels the need for real-time, end-to-end location and condition tracking—from point of origin to final destinations worldwide.
“At Mary Kay, we must make sure that we're delivering high-quality products—every time. The cheapest way is not always the best way for our products.”
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Mary Kay’s original visibility provided location, temperature, and humidity tracking, which was a good start, but the solution was far from perfect. There was no way to track acceleration or shock, both critical metrics for Mary Kay. The Mary Kay team was unable to customize how many tracker pings occurred per hour per shipment, and had to contact the vendor’s tech team to make those adjustments, every time. Plus, they could not track ocean shipments or see the battery life of trackers, which created huge blind spots. “Alerts were coming in, but because we couldn't customize them, our people didn’t know what they were for or which were important—so no one took any action,” Atayan said. But the alerts kept coming: out of compliance, out of compliance, out of compliance.
“The biggest ROI is this: you don't want a $250,000 shipment to freeze. You definitely don't want that.”
Mary Kay’s visibility challenges vanished when they started using Tive in April 2023. The company now uses Tive Solo 5G trackers on all shipments, leveraging the data collected in Tive’s cloud platform to spot anomalies and make operational improvements across the company. They started putting Tive trackers on shipments to Brazil, and could clearly demonstrate how a shipment was supposed to be at a consistent 68° Fahrenheit (20° C)—and it was at 104° Fahrenheit (40° C).” That leads to a lot of ruined products—and lost revenue.
Prior to implementing Tive, Mary Kay didn't know that it took so long for trucks to pass the border in Mexico. Using the data captured by Tive trackers, Mary Kay is now immediately notified if there is a light event, meaning that trailer doors have been opened—which could indicate a theft event.
In addition, Mary Kay monitors lead time to market very closely. Lead times for some APAC markets were set at 86 days since the pandemic, but Tive data helped Mary Kay accomplish a reduction of just 45 days. Using Tive’s shipment visibility solution, Mary Kay can now quickly adjust—improving their operational planning and adapting their inventory management to comply with new, improved lead times.
"In 2023 alone we've reduced our lead times in our planning systems by almost 50%."
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