ACTIVITIES :: eTen :: Projects :: Projects of the Month :: Cold-Trace

July 2006 Project of the Month: Cold-Trace

Cold-Trace – Cold Chain Monitoring and Traceability Services

Issues being addressed

Do you know how your frozen pizza, chicken, fish or vegetables arrive from the production site to the store you shop at? Have you ever wondered how it is ensured that the frozen products are not defrosted during delivery and are therefore safe to eat?

The eTEN Cold-Trace project addresses the problem of traceability, quality control of goods transportation and delivery services that have become an increasing concern to producers, services suppliers, transport decision makers and consumers all over Europe.

Cold-Trace offers a temperature control, GPS trucking and work order management system.

Cold-Trace consists of five components:

Multi-functional PDA for truck drivers, that hosts the Cold-Trace PDA application, integrates a mobile phone, and offers navigation facilities.
“Black-Box”, located on trailers that records information on the geographic position (using GPS) and data from a set of sensors located in the vehicle (temperature, open cargo door, engine data); linked with the headquarters via GPRS/UMTS.
Central office server that receives and processes data from the trucks and sends information to the driver’s PDA.
PDA software application, used by the truck driver to manage work orders, to access the information gathered from the Black-Box, and to be in touch with the headquarters.
Fleet management application that provides the user interface at the office site

Objectives of the project

The overall goal of the Cold-Trace project is to test and validate the market feasibility of Cold-Trace services on a wide-scale basis under different conditions and in various countries prior to initial deployment in a trans-European context. Cold-Trace has set up three pilot sites at three leading companies in the European transportation industry:

Disfrimur: located in Murcia, Spain. The company owns 500 trucks and has over 800 truck drivers. The objective is to validate the Cold-Trace services in 90 trucks, with an active participation of 200 drivers and 6 fleet managers.
O’Donovan Transport: located in Cork, Ireland. With a fleet of 27 trucks and 80 trailers, the objective is to validate Cold-Trace in 20 trucks, with the participation of 26 drivers and 2 fleet managers.
Montfrisa: located in Getafe (Madrid), Spain. With a fleet of 150 trucks, the objective is to validate 16 trucks, with the participation of 25 drivers and 2 fleet managers.

Services

The Cold-Trace solution offers truck drivers a software application that allows them to manage all administrative tasks performed during the trip. Information arising in the truck is sent to the truck company office using mobile communications based on GPRS. At the office site, fleet managers receive information about the situation of the truck, and alarms are triggered in case of a problem.

Main Cold-Trace services:

Real-time interaction between trucks and headquarters
Temperature monitoring during transportation
Information on the exact position of trucks
On-board terminal used to transmit and confirm work orders
Remote control of refrigerated equipment
Safety and control required on drivers’ time schedules
Security of truck loads
Automatic control of “checkpoints” and mileage

Achievements

Installation at Disfrimur, ODT and Montfrisa is almost completed and 125 trucks are currently completely equipped with Cold-Trace. Drivers are being introduced to the system and trained weekly. Since installing the Cold-Trace system, part of the fleets of the pilot companies has become “on line”. Information is recorded every 20 seconds and transmitted every 2 minutes, offering the company regular statistics on service performance and real-time interaction between truck drivers and fleet managers.

Cold-Trace received was nominated as the “Best Mobile Application of the Year” by the Movilforum Exhibition held in Madrid in December 2005. Also Cold-Trace has been presented at the European Cold Storage and Logistics Association - ECSLA Convention held in Dublin in May 2006 and at the Third International Conference on Networked Sensing Systems – INSS held Chicago, USA in June 2006 and will be present at the eChallenges conference in October.

Expected benefits by the end of the project

Cold-Trace offers numerous advantages to road transportation companies and to their customers:

Traceability: the system offers merchandise traceability and a strict control of the cold chain
Cost Reduction. Remote control of refrigerated equipment eliminates many hours of unnecessary work. A more efficient communication between fleet managers, truck drivers and customers reduces the number of phone calls.
Resource Optimization: by knowing the exact position of all available trucks, fleet managers can assign new orders to the ideal truck.
Increased professionalism and level of quality of the services offered by the company
Enhancement in customer services: problems affecting quality are perfectly documented, claims and need for legal processes will be reduced, and insurance company compensation processes will be speed up.
Availability of precise on-line information results in advantages in practically all aspects of the company and its relations with its customers.

The partners

Reference Data

Project's website: http://www.cold-trace.com
Contract Type: Market Validation
Start Date: May 2005
End Date: October 2006
Duration: 15 Months
Contact: yus@inmark.es