All warehouses and distribution centres that handle goods such as foodstuffs or pharmaceuticals, in fact any stock that is environmentally sensitive, are faced with huge challenges.
They need to ensure that products are maintained at exactly the right temperatures, potentially over very large areas, both to comply with Health and Safety Regulations and to prevent spoilage and waste.
As this can involve measuring multiple temperature regimes, the recording and analysis of temperature data can become very involved and labour intensive.
Plus, the obvious traditional methods of recording, such as a thermometer, pen and a clipboard, may not produce results that enable appropriate actions to be taken in time.
If these are the sort of problems that affect your business or facility you may be very interested to hear about a case study one company carried out using the Honeycomb Automated Temperature Tracking and Monitoring from Logicall.
The company in question has a large warehouse site with five different temperature zones, as designated by the proper regulatory authority.
The company’s existing monitoring arrangement involved a food safety employee walking around the warehouse twice a day and making notes from five different individual thermometers, one in each zone.
On a weekly basis their maintenance department compiled a report of the Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning (HVAC) system’s evaporator temperature in each zone.
The drawbacks of such a routine are fairly obvious, in particular the lack of information about temperature trends and incidents taking place between reading times.
Standardisation was also difficult to achieve as was considering how these results might help planning at other locations.
Not to mention the time involved or the shoe leather used.
This is why they trialled the Honeycomb system from Logicall.
This is an affordable, easy to install, flexible, temperature tracking system that offers significant advantages to ’manual’ approaches.
The Honeycomb can be configured to meet your exact needs thanks to the small, reusable, unobtrusive, wireless Honeybee sensors that can be mounted exactly where they are required.
What is more, the system offers real-time alerts that can prevent loss of valuable goods and provide electronic, historically logged, tracking and monitoring reports retrievable by tablet, laptop or even on your smartphone.
For the case study a minimum of two wireless Honeybee sensors were quickly and easily installed in each temperature zone along with a Wireless Sensor Portal (a WaSP).
They also put additional sensors in temperature-controlled trailers used for storage outside the warehouse space.
After the system was configured for each specific zone, operations and maintenance staff were provided with training and log-in credentials and they were away.
After a week’s joint running of the manual and automatic systems the Honeycomb system went solo.
The results exceeded all the warehouse owner’s expectations.
Reviewing the data they found, for example, that the chill dock was actually becoming too cold when freezer doors were being opened and closed.
They were able to save money by reducing the energy used on cooling the chill dock and still stay within food safety regulations.
Furthermore, they found that the Honeycomb’s system was so flexible, and installation was so easy, that they could perform short-term tests that enabled them to measure shelf temperatures and thus optimise storage locations, especially for highly temperature sensitive produce such as bananas.
This state-of-the art technology is not expensive either, proving that the Honeycomb system from Logicall is indeed a logical choice.
