Deployment Of IoT Based Remote Monitoring System For Cold Storage Warehouse
The Context
Perishable food items such as fruits, vegetables, meat, poultry and other dairy products have a limited life post-harvest and are most likely to spoil, rot and decay if not kept under favorable storage conditions. The inability to maintain and monitor the vital ambient parameters within the storage units contributes to this spoilage.
A leading cold storage company having multiple cold storage facilities across the country needed a smart IoT based remote monitoring solution that could help them monitor and maintain the key ambient environment parameters within their cold storage units remotely to extend the life of the products and minimize loss.
The Challenge
- Before using our solution, the client was restricted to traditional ways for monitoring and regulating the ambient parameters within their cold storage units.
- Their cold storage facility mostly stored potatoes and their major difficulty was to maintain the optimum temperature level for different sections of their facility to prevent the spoilage and decay of potatoes. This mainly because different variety of potatoes require different storage environment as per their consumption purpose.
Potatoes for fresh consumption requires a storage temperature of 2-4°C (approx.), for the purpose of chipping and processing a temperature in the range of 4-10°C (approx.) is required and similarly for mashing and roasting a different storage temperature range is required. - The cold storage units mostly had wired probes and sensors to measure the ambient parameters for which they had to solely depend on the on-site presence of the operator to log the records and manage the unit accordingly.
- The operators usually noted these records once a week and any excursion in between led to a significant lag for an action to be initiated. Also, at times they had issues with the maintenance of the sensors resulting in unreliable and inaccurate data. Hence, they decided to upgrade to a solution that could let them remotely monitor their cold storage 24/7.
Our Solution
We at DATOMS analyzed their challenge and offered them a solution consisting of a hardware gateway device that collects and records the data from the sensors continuously in real-time and transmits the information to the cloud server. From the server and by using the DATOMS application platform, the client was able to visualize the data in real-time on a user-friendly dashboard at any place at any time.
Key Features of DATOMS IoT based Monitoring System:
- Our proposed system monitored 3 vital ambient parameters temperature, humidity and CO2.
- We provided them with a web/mobile app for real-time monitoring and concerned facility managers can check the status of their cold storage units at anytime from anywhere.
- The solution sends out alerts at regular interval so the unit managers can be timely notified of the issues whenever the parameters breaches set threshold values.
- A fully automated solution reducing the reliance on a tedious manual process to record data.
- Easy and simple setup requiring no technical expertise.
Impact & Result
By leveraging our IoT enabled monitoring solution, the client was able to overcame the loss of perishable commodities in cold storage through real-time monitoring. Remote monitoring solution will further improve the maintenance efficiency of probes and sensors whenever the value from the device deviates beyond acceptable limits.
The data collected over time will help in analyzing the optimal conditions for storage and identify temperature distribution throughout the cold storage facility. This will help facility managers identify the hot and cold points within their cold storage facility, which will make sure the perishable commodities are stored in conditions that will ensure their quality to meet the long-term supply of commodities.
*The client company is now planning to scale up and expand the remote monitoring solution to its other cold storage units.
We at DATOMS offers smart cold storage monitoring system that leverages the latest IoT and supply chain technologies which improves and enhances the storage conditions of different perishable food be it fruits, vegetables, dairy, meat, poultry, pharmaceuticals etc. within the cold storage facility that requires different storage conditions. DATOMS IoT based cold storage monitoring solution can also be extended to numerous other use cases involving temperature monitoring.
For more information regarding our IoT based solutions and services, get in touch to discuss how we can assist you. Email us: contact@datoms.io
