The Best Practices to Consider While Loading Temperature Sensitive Products to avoid retail chargebacks, freight claims, damage claims and rejected loads

temperature-sensitive-products

This is another best practice on shipping temperature sensitive products. If you’re shipping temperature sensitive products, like if you’re doing some kind of a food distribution or shipping some kind of pharmaceutical products and perishables, even frozen products things like that. 

One thing that you could do is when these are transported, in frozen state then you’re going to have some kind of a refrigerator truck. Even produce goes through a refrigerator truck but slightly not as cold as a frozen product. While transporting such temperature sensitive products you can apply a thermal quilt on the product to make sure the temperature does not go beyond a certain limit or whatever the values that you’ve agreed in your contract. There are thermal quilts available which are thermal wrapping sheets or wrapping material available that you can wrap your pallets with, so the temperature does not exceed. 

You can take pictures of how nicely you’ve applied the thermal quilt on these pallets and how you followed the instructions perfectly like taping up on top of the thermal quilt. You would have taped it nicely and secured it nicely to the pallet. You can take those pictures and upload to LoadProof, so the next day when somebody questions you, you have those pictures and you can show them. 

We had one more interesting customer. These people were moving something like a lettuce or cauliflower or something like that and they were actually dropping it off in another facility and they were to show the temperature when they did the drop off and they were able to take pictures and upload them to LoadProof. They were able to show the temperatures in the temperature gauge with the time and the location and things like that. 

In LoadProof wherever you’re taking pictures you have the ability to track the location with the GPS coordinates so all you have to make sure is when you install the app you’re giving access to the app to capture your location coordinates.  You have to say yes and agree to capture location coordinates so you can see the GPS coordinates in the picture. The timestamp, date stamp, user-id, GPS coordinates all that is captured so that adds even more credibility to the pictures that you’re taking. 

If you’re taking the picture at a different point, at the time of delivery and if you’re taking a picture of the temperature gauge then you can say that “we did our job  and this is whatever (cauliflower/ lettuce) was delivered in a perfect manner within the temperature and even when you’re picking up in the 3pl world this is very common. 

You are picking up from somebody else and if you’re picking it up from somebody else or picking it up from the farmers at a point where it comes from the farmers, then also you can take pictures of this and show the temperature gauge in the picture and explain with with the date stamp, timestamp, user id, and the GPS coordinates. This is another best practice that you can follow to show that you’ve done everything correctly as far as handling these temperature sensitive products. Please comment in the section below for any help in the supply chain.

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Puga Sankara is the co-founder of Smart Gladiator LLC. Smart Gladiator designs, builds, and delivers market-leading mobile technology for retailers, distributors, and 3PL service providers. So far, Smart Gladiator Wearables have been used to ship, receive, and scan more than 50 million boxes. Users love them for the lightweight, easy-to-use soft overlay keyboard and video chatting ability, data collection ability etc. Puga is a supply chain technology professional with more than 17 years of experience in deploying capabilities in the logistics and supply chain domain. His prior roles involved managing complicated mission-critical programs driving revenue numbers, rolling out a multitude of capabilities involving more than a dozen systems, and managing a team of 30 to 50 personnel across multiple disciplines and departments in large corporations such as Hewlett Packard. He has deployed WMS for more than 30 distribution centers in his role as a senior manager with Manhattan Associates. He has also performed process analysis walk-throughs for more than 50 distribution centers for WMS process design and performance analysis review, optimizing processes for better productivity and visibility through the supply chain. Size of these DCs varied from 150,000 to 1.2 million SQFT. Puga Sankara has an MBA from Georgia Tech. He can be reached at [email protected] or visit the company at www.smartgladiator.com. Also follow him at www.pugasankara.com.

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