To comply with legislation and customer requirements, warehouses holding goods with limited shelf-life have to log temperatures and hold records for inspection. Alarms for out of temperature are sent to the mobile phone of the "on-call" engineer.

A typical warehousing company holds €80million of product in just one of its six warehouses at any one time. The warehouse holds temperature sensitive goods as diverse as pharmaceutical drugs, film, cosmetics and perfume.

The Challenge

With over 1 million sq ft of storage area to control the warehousing company has a huge demand for quality control on its hands. Each warehouse is divided into refrigerated areas (0 ºC – 15 ºC ) and zoned temperature controlled (15 ºC – 25 ºC ) shelving areas. Goods have to be stored at the correct temperature to prevent rendering them useless, potentially dangerous, or shortening their shelf life. Proof of correct temperature storage is needed to ensure compliance with license and contract conditions. There are regular visits to the sites by the Drugs Authority who need data of high integrity to meet their exacting requirements.

The company requires a cost-effective, wireless temperature monitoring system that records data automatically. A further requirement is that the data needs to be accessed anywhere on the company’s Ethernet Network.

How we were able to help

We are able to help on two fronts.

1. Thermal Mapping

Bi-annual audits of the temperatures in the warehouse utilizing our time-lapse, multi-layer thermal mapping service are required. All measurements have to be verified by calibration before and after the audit.

A thermal map gives a record of changing thermal conditions in the building. It monitors the effects of sunlight, night-time, air-conditioning and all other variables at all levels from floor to roof. The results are viewed on a PC as a moving picture and the data can be analysed in whatever way is required. The survey identifies hotspots and cold spots in the warehouse.

2. Temperature Audit-trail and Real-time Out Of Temperature Boundary Alarms

As well as thermal audits there is a requirement for constant and accurate temperature checks to be made with alarms if the temperature goes out of boundary and an audit trail to prove the temperature has been within requirements. This is achieved by a clusters of System5 SCOUTs downloading via radio to several networked BASE units. Minimum and maximum alarm levels can be set either individually or in zones and temperatures are recorded automatically at hourly, 10 and 1 minute intervals.The data can then be viewed on PC by any authorised operator on the company Ethernet. The company complies with 21CFR Part 11 and therefore uses the 21CFR Part 11 compliant System5 software option.

Great Delight

The Quality Control Manager reports that the reason they keep buying more is because IceSpy products are simple to use, work and keep working. The SCOUTs are calibrated and accurate. They are portable (can be used in pallets in the back of lorries for instance) and the data cannot be tampered with. On top of all that they get great personal service from IceSpy.

A typical warehouse uses a Multi-point Sensor Monitoring system. Please click on this option below:-

Warehousing / Cold storage