How an Ice Cream Manufacturer is Boosting Its Supply Chain Quality Compliance
One of the world’s largest ice cream manufacturers, generating over $5.5 billion annually in the South Asia market, has taken a significant step towards ensuring the consistent delivery of high-quality products. With 20 plants across India and a customer base of ~700 million, maintaining the integrity of their extensive cold chain has been a crucial challenge. To address this, the company turned to a real-time cold chain monitoring system, seeking to enhance supply chain quality compliance and reduce product spoilage.
The Challenge
Inefficient Operations with Passive Cold Chain Monitoring System
The ice cream manufacturer faced several operational inefficiencies due to its reliance on a passive cold chain monitoring system. The primary tool in use was temperature data loggers, which accounted for a significant portion of the industry’s monitoring solutions. However, these loggers only provided postmortem data, meaning that temperature fluctuations were only identified after they had occurred, leading to two major issues:
1. Product Spoilage
The ice-cream manufacturer was registering many product-spoilage events because of a passive cold chain monitoring system. The passive monitoring system, enabled by temperature data loggers, was creating product loss at two places.
- At Warehouses: In its 20 plants scattered around India, the company has multiple cold storage-specific warehouses. These warehouses store the freshly produced ice creams, ready to be shipped to distribution centres around the country.
The old practice was to equip the facilities with temperature data loggers, which only provided data after a temperature fluctuation had already happened. It takes away the company’s ability to swiftly reach out to the managing staff to avoid deteriorating the quality of ice creams or product spoilage.
The old data was just not enough to assume the conditions a warehouse might be operating in and rarely gave an accurate picture. It led to regular lapses in maintaining the correct temperature and delivering on the promise of quality, and risking its reputation.
Furthermore, apart from the warehouses at the plants, the company also has around 20 major distribution centres in India with cold storage warehouses. However, like the warehouses at the plants, these units were also using temperature data loggers and hence postmortem data — nowhere close to being real-time! And, since there is no access to real-time cold chain data, authorities could not make real-time decisions.
The primary problem was that the company could only determine any fluctuation in the temperature after it had occurred and had possibly led to sub-standard product quality. It means tracing and auditing past ice cream stock was even more difficult.
- In transit: The second area where the company was facing product spoilage was during transit. The cold storage containers — aka reefers — also used data loggers to register temperature fluctuations.
Temperature fluctuations arising from supply chain excursions like unscheduled stops, prolonged dwell times, or regular opening and closing of reefer doors significantly increase product spoilage chances. The company also wasn’t aware of any theft that might be occurring during the transit. This lack of clear real-time information also resulted in a decrease in actionability to correct these issues.
The outcome was the same — with postmortem data, the company didn’t have an option if they received a bad ice cream batch than to discard it. There was no knowledge of the consignment’s health during transit. The ideal temperature window to maintain quality ice cream is between -22 to -18, which leaves a tiny margin for error.
2. Inefficient Operations
Being a large company with multiple entities functioning together, the ice-cream manufacturer dealt with many inefficient operations in their supply chain visibility duties. The inefficiency in cold chain visibility was arising from two main factors.
- Lack of data repositories: The company had no access to clean data from the temperature data loggers. The primary reason for this was that the data was not real-time and was not attached to a cloud service where the concerned quality compliance team can access it.
- The temperature monitoring duties were fragmented: Apart from using a passive cold chain monitoring system, the company’s warehouses worked more as independent entities than as an ecosystem, taking care of their own cold chain monitoring duties. Following a similar trend, the transport partners also had individual cold chain monitoring protocols.
In an event where the company wanted to audit a cold chain event emerging from temperature excursions, it became increasingly complex and lengthy to retrieve exact data. And the team sometimes scrambled many different resources scattered around a vast region like India to verify the origins of a bad batch of ice creams. It led to a time-consuming and inefficient passive cold chain monitoring process.
With its vast experience, the company realized the importance of real-time supply chain visibility, enabling the shift towards an active cold chain monitoring system.
A Solution for Ice Cream Supply Chain Helped Bring Real-Time Cold Chain Visibility
1. Real-Time Cold Chain Visibility and Actionability
The solution offers a range of parameters to track, such as temperature, humidity, shock, light, and tilt. It is an easy-to-deploy, no-touch, tamper-proof design that needs minimum maintenance and personnel involvement. Sensors offered real-time temperature and condition monitoring to the quality ice-cream maker in the context of temperature-controlled warehouse visibility.
The devices, mounted in the warehouse, register temperature at close intervals and relay the information to the Cloud. If it registers fluctuations, actionable insights are then sent to the concerned teams for timely course correction.
The solution also offers unique network optimisation that works in a cold storage-specific warehouse, where connectivity issues are common. The sensors use a GSM Quad Band, with both 2G and 3G compatibility and a GPS signal booster to ensure enhanced transmission capability.
Similarly, it is easily deployable in the in-transit reefers and offers real-time temperature, location, and condition monitoring. The ice cream maker has access to real-time cold chain data and insight, which helps them take corrective action, minimising losses during transit with a near 100 percent accuracy.
The light sensor in the device makes sure that you also have a fair idea of how many times a reefer door was opened or if any unscheduled stops were leading to extended dwell times. Instantaneous alerts to concerned teams mean that timely corrective action can resolve these supply chain issues.
2. A Flexible Solution under One Roof
The solution brought elevated levels of efficiency to the ice cream maker. Unlike what the manufacturer was using previously — a fragmented cold chain monitoring system — the solution brought the temperature monitoring duties under one roof.
A single unified dashboard brings the ability to monitor different warehouse and transport routes together. Alerts relating to imminent product spoilage are highlighted when they happen, offering a fair window to the ground team to make amends.
Results A Boost to Cold Chain Compliance
With the real-time immersive visibility solution, the ice cream maker could boost its cold chain compliance quotient. It was also able to maintain high standards in its quality and could see apparent ROIs by avoiding massive product spoilage and unnecessary rush orders. Cold chain compliance is an important part of a food cold chain, as the product’s rejection rate has a direct correlation with it.
This versatile solution can be deployed in various industries like pharma cold chain monitoring, and other cold chain-specific food and beverage industries.
At the moment, the is enabling 100 percent warehouse and in-transit visibility for the ice cream maker. It includes warehouses in the plants and the distribution centres. Apart from this, the solution is enabling the monitoring of more than 150 transport lanes across the nation, enabling real-time actionability to maintain quality. Besides, it is a solution that brings control to the ice cream manufacturer, with little to no involvement of the ground teams.
