What Are Some Best Practices for Managing a Cold Storage Facility?
The transportation and storage of materials is a critical activity and involves various factors for the proper management of all the materials. Among the various storage facility that is available, the cold storage facilities are the most difficult to manage.
The cold storage facilities are completely different from your other storage facilities as they employ various equipment to keep the goods at a particular temperature. In addition to this, the transportation of the goods also requires the assistance of proper refrigerated trucks or trailers.
As the goods are perishable by nature, you need to be careful in storing and transporting these goods. Under the current circumstances cold storage management has become an increasingly complex process. This is due to the increasing demand for food, medical and pharmaceutical divisions & other stringent regulatory requirements.
Here in this article, we will discuss the best practices that you can adopt for managing your cold storage facility.
Preserving quality & safety
One of the most important things, when you are running a cold storage facility, is maintaining the correct temperature of the perishable products which is necessary for preserving their quality and safety from the point of harvest or manufacture right through the supply chain to the consumer.
If the food products are not maintained at a particular temperature including during their shipment can result in textural degradation, discoloring, bruising and even microbial growth. While in the U.S the focus on cold chain safety is continuously evolving, but in many developing countries are yet to keep pace with the best practices.
Complete visibility and traceability are crucial in case of recalls and the ability to track a product from production or harvest all the way to consumption is critical for ensuring quality. In all this, technology plays a vital role in cold chain traceability and data exchange.
Key considerations & best practices
Cold chain infrastructure facilities require maintaining temperature integrity, controlling all the processes involved and calls for high levels of integration and coordination. Each supply chain step from the producer to the ultimate seller share equal responsibility.
There are multiple phases and facilities along the way which contribute to keeping the goods fresh. For example, cold chain transportation units are commonly designed to keep ambient temperature constant, not to bring the shipment to the optimal temperature.
However, if the shipment is not adequately prepared and conditioned, its quality may be compromised. Moreover, if the shipment will be exposed to extreme cold or heat along the transport route, then due importance must be given to protect the products in transit.
When you are the owner of a cold storage facility, then contingency planning is also important. If one of your trucks breaks down or a cold storage unit malfunctions, then you must be ready with the alternate options to put into action immediately without losing time.
Even with the best systems and monitoring technology, an unplanned delay or rerouting could potentially affect the shipment stability. The cold storage shipment personnel should work with their transportation partners to develop contingency plans that map out a strategy in the event of a delay.
Guard against vulnerabilities
The entire cold storage facility must be geared towards minimizing the time it takes to move a product through the system. You must know efficiency is the key and vulnerabilities occur if there are delays in handling products off from one facility or stage to another.
For managing the cold storage facility efficiently, all the parties involved in the whole process must foster a strong partnership. Everyone needs a good working knowledge of best practices for cold chain handling and transportation. The food products need to be moved as fast as possible.
There is no doubt that the cost of energy, land and labor climbs, operators of cold storage warehouses are increasingly looking towards automation for controlling the costs. There are a growing number of automated point solutions that can drastically reduce escalating operational costs.
In addition to this, in some instances, automation can reduce space requirements by as much as 50%, reduce energy consumption by 80% and labor as much as 70%.
The above-discussed factors are some of the important practices that help in the efficient management of the cold storage facilities. If you are a cold storage facility owner and find it difficult to manage your operations, then get in touch with the professionals to help you out.
