What Are The Challenges with Cold Chain Logistics?

Cold chain companies are under increasing pressure to ensure goods are kept at specific temperatures, yet it is a constant challenge that only gets more complex with every passing year. “The sector is grappling with additional challenges – from increases in the sensitivity, quality standards, and volume of many of its goods, to continually mounting regulations. The cold chain also faces many of the same issues challenging the entire supply chain: service the global market, driving out costs, becoming more strategic, and addressing capacity and resource constraints, all while managing the exacting needs of the sector’s precious cargo – primarily good and pharmaceutical products,” said Inbound Logistics in a recent article on the top trends in cold chain logistics.

As consumers become more informed about their health and what they put into their bodies, they are demanding fresher foods and products, often from thousands of miles away. This raises a logistical challenge. Growers and suppliers of these fresh foods must find ways to bring their products to the consumer in the safest, fastest way that keeps the integrity of the product intact. With foods now sourced from all over the globe, this isn’t always easy.

The food industry isn’t the only one, where temperature fluctuations in the supply chain can impact products. The pharmaceutical industry often brings to market temperature-sensitive medications that can range in their temperature requirements. These medications can travel from one end of the country to another, and even a slight temperature deviation can cause an expensive, potentially life-saving drug to “go bad” before it ever makes it to the patient. Even worse, if these temperature fluctuations aren’t strictly monitored and reported, the patient may still receive a compromised medication that can dramatically impact their treatment or even life. As such, pharmaceutical cold chain logistics involves as much or more oversight than that of the food and beverage industry.

How Cold Chain Logistics Works

Today, third-party logistical companies are taking the cold chain enforcement burden off of the manufacturer, at least when it comes to transporting their goods. These cold chain logistics companies provide specific expertise geared around transporting temperature-sensitive products. According to one source,  “The potential to understand local rules, customs and environmental conditions, as well as estimation of the length and time of a distribution route, making them an important factor in global trade.”

The key to cold chain logistics is to integrate and control the various elements of the supply chain. This requires data and lots of it. This is not data that can be manually curated. There’s simply too much data to consider, and it comes from too many potential sources. Furthermore, these data points are constantly changing. Instead, cold chain logistics companies are leveraging smart technology and data science to bring order to an often chaotic process.

Data science is transforming the logistics industry, just as it is virtually every other industry. When used properly, it enables organizations to gather insights and visualize their shipping networks before anything is shipped. This valuable foresight allows decisions to be made with greater accuracy and better outcomes. The data is out there. Data science pulls it together in meaningful ways.

One such data point is the environment. The environment(s) in which the products will encounter directly impacts cold chain logistics. Using data gathered from historical and predictive weather models, cold chain logistics companies can calculate specific risks for each individual and unique shipment. This data empowers transportation planners with the ability to make more dynamic decisions around transportation modes, shipment timing, and equipment selection in data-rich, intelligent ways.

Original article was published at this link, all credit goes to the original author.