Press Report

To consistently monitor cold chains online, an intelligent shipment tracking is needed to fill the gap concerning the cross-company transportation processes

(frischelogistik 12.2006) The complete monitoring of cold chains is without any doubt one of the predestined application areas for RFID-technology. By means of this technology which has become increasingly important within the logistics sector, data can be read and even saved on a transponder while the shipments are neither touched nor seen. Thus, this technology is well suited for identifying and pinpointing goods within the supply chain. High quality requirements during the transport of sensitive goods, for example, but also current legal prescriptions motivate more and more companies to monitor and document sensitive cold chains very closely. Thus, it becomes possible to ensure for each cold chain that products do not get damaged anymore through extreme temperature changes.

Especially companies which have complex transport processes into which several logistics service providers and a multitude of suppliers and production locations are involved are at present aware of the benefits which result from a superordinate information basis. These enterprises intensively deal with projects which introduce software solutions for the supply chain execution. Supply chain execution solutions such as the Internet-based logistics-server by the Austrian provider inet-logistics are predestined to collect all data centrally which have been recorded by sensor technology while monitoring the cold chain, to edit these data then and provide them to the supply chain partners.

Supply chain execution solutions are not only simple information platforms in the Internet though. They rather provide sophisticated, transport-specific functionalities which can not simply be provided, for example, by common ERP-systems in this complexity. With regard to the complete monitoring of cold chains the logistics-server offers, for example, functionalities for an automatic escalation management. They are activated as soon as transponder data indicate a critical status of products within the cold chain. Here the high degree of cross-linking between all supply chain partners shows one of its many positive effects.