Introduction
As we all know, food before ending up on your plate has to travel great distances and the markets have to undergo a number of activities and processes to provide the customer their products in the best condition. During these activities there is a huge sum that adds up for wastage which in result lowers the target profits. These wastage happen during four stages of the process: Harvesting, Processing, Transportation and Distribution.
From the point of harvesting and until the distribution phase, perishable food must be closely monitored to prevent the damages due to external environmental conditions and dynamic forces applied throughout their journey. When storing different food items, the optimum temperature and humidity must be supplied constantly without temperature fluctuations.
During transportation, drivers must have proper knowledge and guidance avoiding irregular roads simultaneously. In a case where the goods do not turn out to be in the expected standards there is no way of tracing the exact point at which the goods were damaged.
Business Case
One of the popular super markets in Sri Lanka has been undergoing this exact situation and now their previous way of manually monitoring the goods involving laborers is over. The supermarket handles everything from sourcing the vegetables directly from farmers and transporting them to the packaging and distributing centers and then to the stores by next morning.
Key requirements was to constantly monitor real-time temperature in cold rooms, chillers and refrigerators during processing, preservation, storing, packing and transportation so that the perishables will be in its best state for a longer time period and to constantly receive updates and provide monitoring facilities of transportation trucks and its location with the addition of providing route optimization and driver behavior monitoring to minimize damages.
Solution
SenzMate provided the best automated solution to the client by not just measuring the air temperature, but by obtaining the temperature of the actual item itself by deploying the sensor based devices at all areas associated with storing food products and also by providing a gps and temperature tracking system. All the essential conditions can now be tracked and retrieved at any time and from any place needed.
Moreover, since the system is integrated with automatic report generation which is just one click away, users of this system are able to obtain detailed reports at any given time, which can be few hours back, few days back or even weeks because each and every bit of data is stored in the cloud platform.
Action Taken
With the integration of gps devices, route optimization and driver behavior tracking, transportation has become a worry less process for them. All their reefer trucks, containers and other mediums of transportation and storage are now equipped with our sensor based devices. All these data are organized in a user friendly manner so that any user who wants to go through the backlogs won’t have any issue when doing so.
Results
With the integration of SenzMate Polar, the supermarket has benefited tremendously overcoming a vast amount of the wastage problem along with the 24/7 exceptional monitoring service offered. From the previous manual monitoring method the supermarket chain has now moved onto the automated monitoring solution which is tamper-proof, accurate to the point, error free and thus resulting in reduced labor cost, improved energy saving, longer shelf time and higher overall quality of the products delivered.
Few years back, the supermarket used normal trucks to transport their goods, therefore the shelf life of perishables were low and it leads to high wastage. Then they have used re-filler trucks to transport perishables, which leads to reduce the wastage significantly. Currently, integration of Polar to the trucks helps to provide and ensure the optimum temperature to each perishables continuously, which in turn reduce the wastage by 30%.
Meanwhile, assessing the meritorious of investment on Polar by the supermarket is essential to evaluate the business performance. So that, Return on Investment (ROI) is the best metric to indicate the efficiency of an investment. Continuous monitoring through Polar contributes for perishable loss savings (by increasing shelf life) and labor savings to the supermarket, while the investment is only the monthly subscription. Accordingly, extent of time the perishables are kept at optimum temperature is used to evaluate the perishable loss savings, and labor savings quantified based on reduction in labor used for recording the temperature consistently. Hence, its estimated that Polar generates return for the supermarket four times of monthly subscription investment.