By Peter Evans, CEO, Xtract One Technologies
We have spent decades in the physical security industry obsessing over what comes in. Who enters a building, what they are carrying, and whether they pose a threat to the people inside. That focus is legitimate and necessary, but it’s created a significant blind spot in how most organizations think about their security infrastructure, because the risk does not stop at the entrance.
Every facility that screens individuals on the way in and does nothing on the way out has made a decision, usually an unconscious one, that what leaves the building doesn’t matter. In a school, that might mean educational equipment walking out the door with a student who does not plan to return it. In a manufacturing facility, it means proprietary components, finished goods, or raw materials leaving with someone whose intentions were never scrutinized. In a corporate environment, it means assets that represent real capital investment disappearing quietly, one shift at a time.
Employee theft costs US businesses an estimated $50 billion annually, according to multiple industry analyses tracking 2025 data. The manufacturing sector alone reports a median loss of $267,000 per fraud case, ranking it among the highest-loss industries for internal theft according to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners 2024 report. Asset misappropriation , the removal of physical goods, equipment, and inventory, accounts for approximately 89% of all employee theft cases.
The physical dimension of intellectual property theft is often underestimated alongside the digital one. The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property estimates losses to American business from IP theft range from $225 billion to $600 billion annually. While much of that is attributed to cyber activity, the physical removal of proprietary hardware, prototypes, and storage devices from corporate facilities represents a category of loss that access control and camera systems have historically done little to prevent at the point of exit.
The industry calls this asset protection, and it has traditionally been handled through a combination of manual bag checks, access control, and the general assumption that surveillance cameras will deter most people from trying. None of those approaches scale. None of them are consistent. And none of them address the problem at the point where it is actually solvable, which is the entry and exit point itself.
There is also a labor relations dimension to exit screening that most organizations have not fully worked through. Manual bag checks at exit points have generated significant legal exposure for large employers. Amazon has faced multiple class action lawsuits across several US states from warehouse workers claiming they were not compensated for time spent in mandatory post-shift security screening, which in some facilities took between 10 and 20 minutes. Amazon settled one such case for $7.2 million. A Maryland federal case involving nearly 24,000 employees reached the state’s Court of Appeals in 2025 over the question of whether screening time constitutes compensable work.
The legal and labor relations risk of slow, manual exit screening is documented and growing. Organizations that require workers to wait in long post-shift queues for bag checks are carrying legal exposure that scales with headcount.
What is Dual-Direction Screening in Weapons Detection?
When we designed dual-direction screening into Xtract One Gateway, the underlying logic was straightforward. The technology already exists at the entry point. The infrastructure is already in place. The staffing is already there. Is the organization using that investment to its full potential, or is it solving half the problem and calling it done?
Dual-direction screening allows Xtract One Gateway to screen for concealed weapons on ingress and detect asset removal on egress, through the same system, at the same entry point, without additional equipment or significant additional staffing. The detection logic is distinct for each direction. Incoming screening is calibrated for threat objects; outgoing screening is calibrated for the specific assets the facility needs to protect, whether that is electronic devices, components, finished goods, or other high-value items.
What that means in practice is that a single deployment does two jobs that organizations have historically needed two separate programs to accomplish. That matters for the economics of security investment, and it matters for the operational reality of running a security program with the staffing levels most facilities are actually working with today.
What This Looks Like Across Industries
The manufacturing and distribution environment is where dual-direction screening makes the most immediate operational sense. Facilities in this sector face a persistent tension between the speed of production and the security of what leaves the building. Shift change periods concentrate hundreds of workers moving through entry points in compressed windows, and manual inspection at that volume is neither practical nor consistent. The median fraud loss in manufacturing is $267,000 per case, and asset losses in this environment tend to be systematic rather than opportunistic, meaning they accumulate quietly over time before anyone identifies the pattern.
A dual-direction Gateway deployment at shift change entry points gives security staff accurate, specific information about what is moving out of the facility, without creating the kind of friction that slows production or damages the relationship between the organization and its workforce. The screening is consistent across every individual moving through the lane. It doesn’t depend on a supervisor’s judgment about who looks suspicious. It doesn’t vary by shift or by who happens to be working that day.
The speed of that screening matters more than it might appear. Manual bag checks that extend shift-end wait times beyond a few minutes create compensable time exposure under federal and state wage laws in many jurisdictions. The legal record on this is clear and growing. Organizations that implement exit screening through AI-powered detection rather than manual inspection are removing a category of labor relations risk that manual programs carry by design.
In corporate environments, the asset protection conversation tends to center on intellectual property and electronic devices, but the physical dimension of that problem is often underestimated. Laptops, tablets, specialized equipment, and proprietary hardware represent significant capital investment, and the exit point is where the opportunity to protect that investment is most direct. Company IP, when compromised, represents the costliest category of data loss at $178 per record according to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, and physical removal of hardware and storage devices is a vector that digital security programs do not address. Dual-direction screening at corporate entry points gives security teams visibility into what is leaving the building without requiring the kind of invasive inspection that creates legitimate employee relations concerns.
Schools present a different version of the same dynamic. Educational technology represents one of the largest per-student investments most districts make, and one-to-one device programs put significant assets in the hands of a large population moving in and out of buildings multiple times a day. The ability to configure Xtract One Gateway to screen for device removal on egress addresses a real operational problem that most school security programs currently handle through honor systems and periodic audits.
The Staffing Argument Is Understated
One of the most significant operational benefits of dual-direction screening is one that rarely leads the conversation: it doesn’t require doubling the security staffing model to protect both directions of traffic.
Traditional approaches to asset protection at exit points require dedicated personnel conducting manual checks, which means either pulling staff from other functions or adding headcount. Neither option is straightforward in the current staffing environment, where security roles are difficult to fill and retention is a genuine challenge across the industry.
The legal exposure attached to slow manual screening compounds that staffing challenge. When exit screening takes longer than a few minutes, organizations face wage liability questions that scale with the size of the workforce moving through those checkpoints. A detection program that moves people through in seconds rather than minutes eliminates that exposure at the same time it solves the operational problem.
Dual-direction screening through Xtract One Gateway uses the infrastructure already in place at the entry point. Staff who are already managing ingress screening are positioned to respond to egress alerts without a restructuring of how the security operation is staffed. That efficiency compounds over time, because the program does not degrade when staffing is tight in the way that manual inspection programs inevitably do.
Rethinking What an Entry Point Is For
The way most organizations think about an entry point is as a threshold — a line between outside and inside. Security happens at the threshold, and once someone is inside, the security calculus changes.
Dual-direction screening asks a different question. What if the entry point is not a threshold but a control point? A place where the organization has consistent, documented visibility into what moves in and out, in both directions, with the same accuracy and the same operational discipline?
That reframe changes what a security investment can accomplish. It makes the entry point the centerpiece of a complete security program rather than one half of a problem that still needs a separate solution on the other side.
The technology to do this exists. The infrastructure is already in place at most facilities that have deployed Xtract One Gateway. Are you using it?