TOWARDS A NET ZERO COLD CHAIN
Amy Shortman | Director of Product Marketing | Overhaul
amy.shortman@over-haul.com
Digitalisation of the Cold Chain
October 2020
The cold chain presents unique considerations during storage and transportation. Why is managing these risks such a challenge, and what are the solutions?
Current Cold Chain Market and Challenges
According to an Allied Market Research report, the cold chain logistics market in the UK is projected to reach $24.37 billion by 2026 — a 23.6% CAGR from 2019.
The rapid growth of the cold chain market necessitates solutions that offer logistic optimisations to drive down cost while maintaining standards and offering real-time visibility into the product, enabling proactive planning and risk management.
As customers’ demands for supply chain information and real-time data increase, the logistics industry needs to move fast to stay competitive and ensure they select visibility solutions that are effective and efficient.
Product Integrity and Safety Challenges
Changes in temperature during transport can lead to compromised food safety and quality. These issues risk consumer confidence and potentially even health while increasing food waste, a global concern.
The primary challenge to managing the food cold chain comes from fragmented data and multiple players, resulting in a lack of real-time oversight about the product’s condition. With the deterioration of the product’s quality affecting food safety and creating waste, real-time data is necessary to adjust handling and stock.
Security Challenges
During times of uncertainty, such as the current pandemic, the security of all shipments is vulnerable. TAPA EMEA reported, “For the first 182 days of 2020, TAPA’s IIS database has so far recorded 3,278 cargo theft incidents with a total loss of €85,166,106 for the 2,154 or 65.7% of these crimes reporting a value. Over €52 million of this total was attributed to the 96 major incidents, those with individual losses of goods worth €100,000 or more. The average value of products stolen in these cases was €542,761.
Five countries accounted for 87% of all cargo thefts recorded by TAPA’s IIS in this six-month period. The United Kingdom recorded the highest number of major cargo losses in this reporting period with 56 or 63.6% of all crimes with a value of €100,000 or more. These produced a total loss of €27,658,653 or an average of €493,905. Food & Drink accounted for €2,987,254.”[1]
Intelligence-Driven Risk Management & Real-Time Visibility
The solution to maintaining the safety and integrity of cold chain products, while documenting an established chain of custody, requires technology. Yet, most existing solutions designed for supply chains offer limited information that is fragmented across multiple platforms.
Bringing Together the Cold Chain Ecosystem
An intelligence-driven risk management and real-time visibility technology solution is required, a platform that integrates a multitude of data sources, including IoT devices, GPS tracking system, vehicle telemetry, TMS, ERP systems, and more. By offering a single unified view that aggregates all available data in real-time, as well as contextual information, pro-active risk management is enabled.
The result is a customised rules engine workflow that monitors your shipments against your SOPs to identify non-conformances, while maintaining visibility of your entire network and quality of products in real time.
Logistics Optimisation
A real-time visibility and risk management solution offers significant optimisation benefits for logistics. By digitising the supply chain and gaining visibility, managing ETAs and stock-flow becomes simplified.
In addition to enhanced logistics planning, technology enables automated temperature monitoring to help food business operators take corrective actions and evaluate their operation.
Streamlining communication with stakeholders is simplified from a logistics perspective, as all relevant data is in one simple single unified view and exceptions are alerted to relevant stakeholders.
Benefits for Quality
In the cold chain, quality is the pre-eminent concern. Visibility into a product’s condition allows corrective actions to be taken to prevent spoilage damage. The real-time temperature monitoring system can be defined specific to the product’s requirements, with the ability to check, measure, and report the actual temperature at any time during shipment.
Security Benefits
Security, traceability, and immediate alerts in the event of tampering or theft, with a unique recovery solution that works directly with law enforcement services, is enabled through a comprehensive technology solution.
Overhaul: Your Cold Chain Technology Solution
Unlike other technology solutions that require extensive setup, Overhaul’s platform layers on top of existing systems to seamlessly integrate and digitise cold chains. Real-time information, data transparency, and pro-active risk management enable immediate, cost-saving benefits to cold chain logistics, integrity, and security.
Get more information about how Overhaul’s solution helps to protect the cold chain.
Source – TAPA
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