FEATURE
INCORPORATING COLD CHAIN
Another benefit of technology is in addressing costs – which are very high in cold supply chains . Measure and monitoring devices can calculate any plant or equipment efficiency and enables managers to identify opportunities for improvement on a holistic scale .
Doing business and insurance is an ever-evolving relationship .
Monitoring and measuring ultimately continually re-enforces correct behaviour , adherence to set or essential protocols , and improves overall efficiency .
CHALLENGES FOR TELEMATICS AND MONITORING Because of the many different technologies and products involved , a significant challenge lies in getting all of the data generated to a single platform – while this is the race for many service providers currently both locally and globally . There are possibly only a handful of companies around the world that have the ability ( and resources ) to handle a single platform interface ( such as Amazon ).
South Africa is , frankly speaking , not at this level of sophistication owing to costs and most companies resorting to using third party providers who dedicate their function to these services , and where larger companies also invest billions of rands into their technologies over time . There is of course local aspiration to be able to provide a single platform , but resistance will naturally exist by the vast list of competitor products available to the end users . These circumstances are driving many original equipment manufacturers ( OEM ) to continue to develop their own fully integrated systems to eliminate dependence on such third-party devices , which in turn holds risks for those companies not keeping up with trends .
Another challenge in technology at this point in time is that a significant number of sensors and monitoring devices in the global context are battery operated which results in a shorter lifespan or single use application . They are also quite pricy from a local perspective and although internationally a culture of single use devices is common , it ’ s not so for South African companies who have to invest USD5 , 200 times per shipment .
Yet another challenge is the network infrastructure ( 3G / GSM ) which is the primary method of data transfer today that moved away from the older method of human involvement and downloading data from a device manually . The older method also held the potential for data to be manipulated and thus creating an environment of lack of
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Part of the cold chain includes movement of various medicines and vaccines – that in Africa may involve significant risks owing to criminal syndicates .
trust around reported figures being accurate . Today it is safe to say that data gathered is relatively ‘ tamper proofed ’.
Another point to consider is that the overall dynamics in South Africa , and directly linked to insurance , is that realtime monitoring relies on connectivity which is directly linked to power supply that we know , has been , and will likely be a persisting challenge into the future . Every time one of the cellular providers have an outage , there ' s a massive knock-on effect for the entire supply chain and therefore advances in cellular technology operation and efficiency in battery use is becoming more important too .
FUTURE PROSPECTS OF TECHNOLOGY RELATED TO INSURANCE Doing business and insurance is an everevolving relationship . Although very
30 www . coldlinkafrica . co . za COLD LINK AFRICA • March / April 2022