Transportation management: As transportation plays a key role in the cold chain, there should be efficient equipment and machines for the transport of products. Transportation includes inbound and outbound logistics. Inbound Logistics is the movement of materials, parts or unfinished inventory from suppliers to manufacturing or assembling plants, warehouses. Outbound logistics is a movement of the final product from the end of the production line to the end user. All these functioning’s should be taken into consideration.
Supply chain solutions: Cold chain solutions are processes which take care of these storing and transporting facilities. This cold chain solution generally includes planning, procurement, manufacturing, warehousing, inventory management, transport, distribution of goods. Supply chain management plans, implements, and controls the flow of goods from the point of origin to the point of consumption. The noticeable thing is that all these activities are interrelated. So if there is a disturbance in any one activity, then the total chain gets disturbed. These help extend and ensure the shelf life of products such as food, pharmaceutical drugs, and chemicals.
Cold storage: Storing in proper temperature conditions is important to maintain the quality of the product. These items require different temperatures for storing based on the item. Some of the storing types of equipment are walk-in-freezers, walk-in-coolers, deep freezer, ice-lined refrigerator, cold boxes, vaccine carriers, ice packs.
Warehousing: It is a planned space for storage. The qualities that should be considered are safety, security, pest control, warehouse maintenance and cleaning, record keeping, and reporting, reverse logistics, disposal of obsolete and damaged goods. To select a warehouse, the following information must be taken into consideration. They are the volume of goods, speed of throughput required, transit point, area for sorting and consolidating different goods, buffer in the event of a breakdown or delay in the supply pipeline.
Planning: All these should be well planned by a service provider. Basically planning includes considerations such as allocating space for each type of product, allowing sufficient space for easy access to the stacks for inspecting, loading and unloading, allowing space for storage of cleaning materials and supplies, allowing space for damaged items, transportation cost, inventory methods. Inventory management should also be taken into consideration. It is taking supervision over unfinished goods and transporting them to warehouses for further transporting or assembling. These are the main things one should consider.
