The Importance of IoT for Cold Chain
The promise of real-time cold chain visibility has long intrigued cold chain leaders. For practical purposes, however, that initial excitement seemed to atrophy into many years of ‘hurry up and wait.’ During that time, onboard temperature recorders have continued to be the accepted practice for temperature monitoring in transit. Unfortunately, such devices draw attention to temperature issues after the fact, helping only in identifying compromised product rather than in informing front-line decision making and preventing product loss.
Gartner’s Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies for 2018 continues to position IoT platform close to the “Peak of Inflated Expectations” and another five to ten years away from maturity. None the less, the number of connected devices continues to grow rapidly. According to IHS Markit, the IoT market will increase from 15.4 billion devices in 2015 to 30.7 billion devices in 2020 and 75.4 billion in 2025. According to the 2018 MHI Annual Industry Report, 59% of survey respondents believe that Internet-of-Things (IoT) adoption will be disruptive or provide a competitive advantage, up from 55% in 2017.
New technologies and service providers have continued to emerge in recent years, although the uptake of pallet-level IoT monitoring remains modest. Barriers to IoT adoption in the cold chain have long known but until LPWA (low power wide area) technology there was no alternative solution for the whole supply chain.
“Tracking solutions have either been too expensive or fail due to issues with the need to go through gates or have a manual screening procedure,” explained Ittay Hayut, Co-founder & CEO of hoopo, a provider of affordably priced asset management and tracking solutions. Using hoopo’s unique geolocation technology, its LPWA tracking solution is capable of geo-locating devices without using GPS.
“The expensive solutions are also not an integral part of the pallet and require frequent battery replacement when using GPS,” Hayut continued.
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