time. “They can go into our portal and nd out the status of the shipment,” Guillen says. INSIGHTS FROM ACROSS THE CHAIN Carrier Corporation, a global heating and cooling systems company, provides solutions for maintaining and monitoring the cold chain. Along with food and beverages, companies use the systems when transporting pharmaceuticals, biologics, lab samples, diagnostic materials, chemicals, and owers. One of Carrier’s newest cold chain solutions is Lynx, a cloud-based visibility platform that monitors temperatures and related data from across an entire supply chain. “The platform offers all stakeholders the ability to securely and seamlessly connect and share data, hardware, services, and applications to deliver more ef cient and intelligent cold chain operations at scale,” says Alice DeBiasio, vice president and general manager, digital solutions and Sensitech, at Carrier Refrigeration in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. For example, Carrier’s Lynx Fleet solution, based on the platform, collects thousands of data points from all the equipment involved in maintaining the cold chain—from the temperatures in cargo areas to performance data for refrigeration equipment. “It then distills, analyzes, and consolidates this critical data into different insights, so eet managers can quickly spot assets that may require special attention and make appropriate and informed decisions to optimize business operations,” DeBiasio says. Managers access this information via a dashboard. Examples of the insights a company can gain through the Lynx dashboard include information on how much fuel it’s using to run refrigeration assets; visibility on battery and power management and alerts about anomalous conditions; and alerts to prevent catastrophic failures, such as the shutdown of a refrigeration unit.
BEYOND DRY ICE For most new vaccines and other medical products that require ultra- low temperatures, the standard shipping solution is an insulated container stocked with dry ice. But dry ice comes with some serious drawbacks. “It’s very dicult to get dry ice outside industrialized countries,” explains Peter Michael Hansen, head of global applications for Secop, a Flensburg, Germany-based company that makes compressors for cooling systems. “For example, it is almost impossible to transport COVID vaccines deep into Africa or other places with dry ice.” Because it’s made of carbon dioxide that evaporates while in use, dry ice also harms the environment, Hansen adds. With those and other challenges in mind, Secop and B Medical Systems, a producer and distributor of medical grade transport and storage solutions, have teamed up to create a new kind of medical transport box. Instead of passive cooling with dry ice, the new UT31 box uses a pair of battery-driven compressors, made by Secop, to keep product chilled inside a rotomolded insulated box created by B Medical Systems. The UT31 will be a mobile ultra-low temperature freezer with a small capacity. The compressors are designed to take the temperature down to -122.8 F and keep it there, regardless of conditions outside. While the box is in transit, the shipper can arrange to plug it into the vehicle’s battery. “There is no risk of a power disruption that might destroy the vaccine,” says Vittorio Iormetti, head of cooling technology and testing at B Medical Systems in Hosingen, Luxembourg. The unit includes a remote temperature monitoring device that tracks the temperature inside the box and other conditions, such as remaining battery power and location based on GPS coordinates. The unit transmits this data in real time and sends alarms if anything goes wrong. “We can access that information through the web," Iormetti says. “It warns the shipper about what’s happening with the product.”
January 2023 • Inbound Logistics 199
Powered by FlippingBook