The Future of Cold Chain
Monitoring your trailers is essential to maintaining cold chain integrity.
When you manage cold chain products, you have to manage their integrity from door to door and end to end. That means that your trailers play a key role in temperature control, so monitoring them is essential. So too, is ensuring fuel levels remain high enough at all times to keep the temperature controls working.
While this has always been the case, the pandemic and the fragility of COVID vaccines brought the importance of temperature control more into the spotlight. With the potential loss of valuable vaccines that needed to get into arms, companies began putting extra effort into the maintenance of the cold chain. Software developers stepped up to the challenge, and today, the tools are better than ever.
Temperature control is a job made easier when you own your trucking assets. Once the products are unloaded and moved into storage, the job becomes easier. But in the yard, if you don’t have your own pool of trailers, you’ll need to work with your outside trucking partners to ensure product integrity. That’s where partnering with a vendor who can monitor your equipment while it’s idling in your yard comes into play.
Modern software solutions allow you to get data points on the reefers in your yard. From the moment they enter your gates, whether company-owned assets or not, these tools will let you know what’s going on inside the reefers.
When you set a temperature inside a trailer—say 32 degrees for frozen goods—it’s akin to using the thermostat in your home. If that temperature changes, say by two degrees one way or the other, with software, you can set an alert to tell you when the trailer is no longer at 32 degrees. The latest iteration of the software doesn’t even require a log in to your dashboard for that information—it simply sends you an alert.
Beyond temperature, you need to also manage the fuel level of the assets in your yard. Reefer units have a separate fuel cell apart from the tracker, and you need to monitor them to ensure they have enough fueled to maintain temperature integrity. This monitoring can take place in your yard, or was the tractor trailer travels down the road between point A and point B. Often, tractor trailers spend time sitting in place, idling, which can be a big drain on fuel. This is where the software alerts can save the day. Set it for a quarter tank of gas, for instance, and it will tell you when it’s hit that threshold. Then instead of worrying about losing the valuable produces on board, you can get fuel into the assets.
Monitoring temperatures—whether hot or cold—inside tractor trailers, is a critical part of the cold chain equation. By engaging with a software provider, you can ensure your assets, and those of your partners, remain at the temperature you need.
Source: Severiano Carnera, Yard Management
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