Every six months or so, the questions we hear most from security directors shift because the programs they’re running mature and the problems they’re trying to solve get more specific. The November release is a direct response to where those conversations have been heading over the past year.
Here’s what emerged on November 2nd and why it matters.
Measuring Everything That Happens at the Gate
The physical security industry has operated on two numbers for as long as AI-powered weapons detection has existed. Throughput and alert rate, in other words, how fast people move through the primary screen and how often the system alerts. Both are useful yet neither tells you what happens after an alert occurs, how long secondary screening takes, or what’s driving that time.
Mean Time to Secure closes that gap for the first time.
MTTS equals Mean Time to Detect plus Mean Time to Resolve. MTTD measures the primary screening phase, from the moment an individual enters the gateway’s sensor range to the moment the system issues a scan result. MTTR measures the secondary screening phase, from the moment the system alerts to the moment a divestor classifies the result. Together they produce MTTS, the complete security-side entry metric.
The reason this matters is that the entry experience security directors are responsible for is determined as much by secondary screening as by what happens at the primary screen. A program running a 15% alert rate with a 4-minute average resolution time produces a worse experience than one running 25% alerts with a 30-second resolution. Alert rate alone has never been able to surface that distinction. MTTS does.
The data feeds continuously into Xtract One View, where security directors can track MTTD, MTTR, and MTTS across every deployed system in real time alongside verified weapon counts by type. For the first time, the report a security director takes to leadership reflects what the program is actually producing, not just how fast people crossed a line on the floor.
Giving Secondary Screening the Data It Deserves
The Divestor workflow has always been the human side of the equation. A system alerts then a staff member responds. Whether that response is fast, informed, and well-documented has historically depended entirely on the individual doing it.
The Divestor enhancements in this release change that. Staff can now classify confirmed threats directly in the Console App during secondary screening, feeding verified data into Xtract One View in real time. The classification action is also what timestamps the end of the MTTR clock, which is what makes Mean Time to Secure trackable in the first place. The two features are connected by design.
The reason we built it this way is that the data coming out of secondary screening is some of the most valuable information a security program produces. What was found, where it was found, and how long it took to find it tells you more about program performance than any primary screen metric ever could. Giving security teams a structured, fast way to capture that data and feed it directly to leadership reporting was the missing piece.
Detection Settings That Show You the Downstream Consequences
One of the most consequential decisions a security director makes is where to set detection. Higher settings catch more threats and generate more alerts. Lower settings reduce alert volume and narrow detection coverage. The tradeoff has always been real, but the data to understand it in advance has never been available at the point of decision.
The detection settings enhancement changes that. Security teams can now see projected alert rates and estimated detection rates for specific threat items based on their chosen settings, drawn from AI training data and live customer operational data. The impact of a detection change is visible before it’s committed, which means the decision gets made on evidence rather than instinct.
The downstream consequence of a detection setting increase, specifically what it does to MTTR during peak entry windows, has been one of the most common sources of operational problems we see across deployments. When alert rates climb past the capacity of secondary screening to process them efficiently, MTTR compounds. Giving security teams visibility into that relationship before they adjust settings is one of the most practical things we could build.
Operational Improvements That Compound Over Time
The rest of the release is a set of improvements that individually feel incremental and collectively change how the platform operates.
Pod Auto Sync eliminates the manual leader configuration steps that added overhead to multi-unit Xtract One Gateway deployments. Assign systems to the same pod number and they handle the rest. If a leader fails, the group elects a new one in under two minutes without any intervention.
Cloud managed security updates mean incremental patches can now be deployed over the air from Xtract One View. The requirement for on-site field visits to keep systems current is gone.
Localization improvements to SmartGateway mean secondary screening staff receive more precise information about where on an individual’s body a threat was detected, which makes the secondary screening interaction faster and more purposeful.
Statistical exports and peak scans per minute give security teams the operational data they need to identify bottlenecks, adjust staffing, and build the evidence base for program reviews and compliance reporting without additional steps.
Interface alignment between Xtract One View and the Console App means the same knowledge applies across both platforms. Configuration is faster, errors are less likely, and onboarding new staff takes less time.
AI model improvements for SmartGateway deliver higher accuracy across new threat items on existing hardware. Detection capability improves without requiring equipment replacement.
This release reflects a direction the product has been moving toward since we introduced the MTTS framework at GSX: building tools that give security directors the data to answer the questions their leadership is asking, and the operational controls to act on what the data shows.
Customers can find full release notes and installation guidance through their Xtract One support contact. For anyone who wants to see what MTTS looks like in their specific environment, connect with our team here.