Visibility has become accepted as one of the core tenets of supply chain management. Having a real-time view of the location of assets and inventory is essential to avoiding unexpected disruptions.
But what about a real-time view of not just location, but status? That’s the question being asked by food and beverage shippers, who need to worry about not just location but factors like temperature and humidity.
Automated fleet operations platform Motive on Tuesday unveiled a product that could provide an answer. The company’s new Reefer Monitoring solution gives fleet operators a real-time look inside the trailer to help them comply with temperature and humidity requirements set out by the Food Safety Modernization Act.
“Delivering ice cream at minus-20 degrees when it’s 90 degrees outside requires us paying great attention to the conditions inside our reefers,” said Marc Cain, transportation manager for Motive customer Mayer Bros. Apple Products. “Having this level of visibility saves us 5-10 hours per week in fleet manager productivity and prevents any spoilage.”
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With Reefer Monitoring, Motive is able to transmit temperature and humidity data to fleet operators every 15 minutes. Additionally, customers of Thermo King — one of the world’s largest manufacturers of transport temperature control systems — can integrate with the platform through a new partnership also announced Tuesday.
“We’ve had customers in the space for a long time, to be honest, and a large part of why we did this is that we’ve been getting a lot of requests from our customers about being able to manage this aspect of their supply chain as well,” Jai Ranganathan, chief product officer at Motive, told Modern Shipper.
Ranganathan explained that the solution has a few key components. One is the Asset Gateway, a compact transmitter mounted on top of the trailer that sends data to the cloud. It can be installed within 30 minutes and is solar-powered, but it can also be charged through a battery and power cable.
Of course, there’s also the temperature and humidity sensors themselves. Each one is powered by a small battery designed to last months rather than weeks. Once installed, the sensors collect data and send it to the Asset Gateway to be transmitted every 15 minutes, though they are almost always taking readings.
The final piece of the solution is the integration with Thermo King, which allows customers who already have a reefer monitoring system in place to easily access that data in real time. It even lets fleet managers control the temperature of each shipment at will.
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“So if a fleet manager is sitting in the back office and wants to set the temperature, they can actually issue a command that comes through our interface and is deployed to the Thermo King system,” Ranganathan said.
Every shipment tracked within the system generates a report that allows the user to view a timeline of the journey. That can help fleet managers comply with FSMA requirements, which set out different temperature bands for different foods and beverages. If the temperature is outside the mandated range for too long, carriers can be subject to penalties.
“But beyond the reports, you also have alerting capability,” Ranganathan said. “So if your food is drifting outside of the appropriate temperature zone, you’re actually getting an alert and can immediately act on it.”
Another benefit of Reefer Monitoring is that it integrates with some of Motive’s other solutions. For example, fleet managers can keep track of food and beverage shipments in the same place they optimize their routes or check on driver safety.
“The idea is to have a pretty standard interface across the entire fleet management solution,” Ranganathan explained. “So whether it’s dispatch and routing, whether it’s location tracking, whether it’s communicating to your customer on where things are, we can actually do all of that through the same solution.”
Since its founding in 2013, Motive has accumulated about 120,000 customers and more than 700,000 vehicles and assets in its network. All of the company’s devices and hardware, including those used by the Reefer Monitoring solution, are proprietary.
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