GPS Tracking and Performance Monitoring for Refrigerated Trucks Rastrac Team | May 10, 2016 11:54:33 AM

When moving perishable goods over long distances, it’s absolutely vital that those good are moved as quickly as possible while in tightly-controlled conditions. This is why countless companies rely on refrigerated trucks to transport perishable goods such as fruits, vegetables, ice cream, and frozen food.

However, managing a fleet of refrigerated trucks introduces new challenges.

For example, if the refrigeration fails during transit, the entire load of perishables may be lost. Also, a significant delay in getting to your destination may put some perishable goods with a shorter shelf life past their sell-by dates. Additionally, there’s a greater need for maintenance and power consumption with refrigerated trucks.

Tackling these challenges can be tough, but using GPS tracking systems designed for refrigerated trucks can help.

Detecting Refrigeration Failures

One of the biggest worries with any shipment of perishable or frozen goods is that the refrigeration in the truck may fail, causing a loss of all product in the shipment.

The issue is that, unless the driver is constantly stopping the vehicle once every couple of hours to get out of the cab and into the refrigeration unit to check the temperature, it’s all too easy for a refrigeration failure to go undetected long enough for the cargo to spoil.

GPS tracking for refrigerated trucks can help alleviate this worry. Specially-designed GPS trackers for refrigeration trucks can include special capabilities such as temperature monitoring, which is incredibly useful for detecting a refrigeration failure straight away.

With temperature monitoring, you can set a temperature alarm for each refrigerated truck being tracked in your fleet management software so that when a trailer’s temperature gets too high, you’ll be alerted right away.

This cuts the time it takes to respond to a refrigeration failure down from hours to mere minutes, giving you the chance to save the perishable cargo by either fixing the issue causing the refrigeration failure or transferring the load to a different truck with working refrigeration.

Better yet, GPS tracking software allows you to create a trip report complete with a temperature readout of the trailer at the time of each update sent to RASTRAC. You can show this report to your customers as proof that the temperature in the refrigeration trailer consistently remained at the required level throughout the trip.

Preventing Breakdowns

On the road breakdowns are bad enough with regular cargo deliveries. With refrigerated products, such breakdowns can be disastrous.

GPS tracking systems for refrigerated trucks can help to prevent costly breakdowns on the road by providing you with automated engine performance reports for your fleet vehicles. With these reports, you can identify which vehicles need preventative maintenance and when.

This helps you optimize your preventative maintenance scheduling so that vehicles don’t break down while transporting perishable, time-sensitive cargo.

Improving Route/Detour Planning

When dealing with long-distance cargo delivery routes, it isn’t always possible to anticipate every instance of road construction, traffic accidents, and other random events that can cause traffic to come to a grinding halt.

GPS tracking for fleet vehicles can make it easier to change a truck’s path once it encounters heavy traffic, allowing you to reroute the vehicle along roads that are less congested so that delays are minimized.

This helps keep trucks on-schedule for deliveries of highly perishable goods, maximizing their saleable shelf life.

For companies with refrigerated trucks and other specialty equipment listed among their fleet vehicles, using GPS tracking and remote diagnostic equipment is a must to maintain peak efficiency and prevent costly equipment failures.