Latin America. The specialist in transport logistics, Solistica, shared a series of recommendations for the management of products that require minimum conditions of temperature and controlled humidity during transport.
The logistics processes involved depend on key factors to overcome it. These are the most important:
1. Measuring key variables
Recording and controlling, mainly, the temperature, and when required, the humidity level, with the right materials and tools, is the most important activity in these processes.
2. Storage conditions
Adequate storage in this case requires: health, the necessary refrigeration capacities, and efficient logistics for all related activities, from loading and unloading, and the location of products, to picking or order picking, through packaging.
Currently, in the best refrigerated warehouses, it is no longer necessary to collect information manually from temperature meters, as monitoring with sensor-based technology facilitates this data for analysis.
There is also thermal imaging and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) monitoring, which analyzes the airflow during the cooling process and allows determining the optimal ventilation for boxes, pallet distribution and other variables within cold storage.
3. Transport and its conditioning
When transporting products that require a cold chain, vehicles and their correct conditioning are essential.
This type of transport requires pre-cooling to a lower temperature than that of the product to be transported, to eliminate waste heat, it must have the necessary technology and temperature control tools, and have backup systems that prevent the cold supply chain from breaking at any time.
4. Technological innovation and real-time information
To ensure the accuracy of all these processes, technology has evolved into auxiliary devices for refrigeration and complete traceability. There are both target reading equipment (known as loggers) and real-time reading equipment (known as trackers or thermographers).
These advances give maximum efficiency to the processes, both with control and monitoring systems and devices, as well as with good software to control all logistics operations and tasks in the chain.
Currently there are even cooling systems with natural refrigerants such as ammonia (NH3) or carbon dioxide (CO2), systems that extract heat from the field to start the cold chain process. Real-time monitoring of loads also allows to obtain data on location, temperature, humidity and other variables such as CO2 levels, or door opening, to take better control.
Increasing the capacity to monitor and control the cold chain allows timely corrective actions to be taken when a critical variable leaves the ranges established for quality control, thus offering the opportunity to avoid losses or reduce losses, while the registration itself, the log of conditions throughout the chain, allows the parties involved to validate that the products were kept in the required conditions.
5. The human factor
Although these new technologies offer a lot of certainty, the issues of training of the personnel involved should not be left aside, technical updates and training in general is essential to take advantage of the benefits of these technologies when managing the cold chain.
Finally, even beyond compliance with legal regulations and the requirements that must be observed by operators when it comes to products like these, we must remember that any failure in any part of the chain, will damage the products, reduce them, or in the least of cases, decrease their quality, often with consequences for human health, such as the proliferation of dangerous microorganisms in the case of food and the loss of effectiveness in the case of medicines.
So, the investments and adjustments necessary for better management of the cold chain benefit us all from an economic and social point of view.
