Fleet Management Journey

When you’re a heavyweight of the food services and distribution sector with a reputation for technological innovation and your major customer has requirements well beyond the industry average, who do you turn to for a cold chain telematics solution? In the case of Golden State Foods (GSF) Distribution, a division of Irvine, California-based Golden State Foods, it was Coretex.

Background

GSF Distribution, who has been delivering food all over America for nearly 50 years, went shopping for an integrated solution for its fleet of trucks and refrigerated trailers in 2012, when its existing Hours of Service (HOS) technology, already long in the tooth, was approaching sunsetting.

The Situation — Large cross vertical needs

Tim Bates, the company’s Corporate Quality Systems Director – Logistics, says the replacement needed to be robust and to have plenty of scope for customization to keep up with GSF’s changing business needs. Also on the requirements list: a highly reliable platform and, preferably, the same provider for both truck and trailer telematics.

 Five telematics vendors were shortlisted by the GSF team, which chose Coretex’s IBRIGHT platform because it offered the best match with GSF’s complex business needs at a competitive price.

The Solution — In-Cab, Reefer and Hours of Service all in one

GSF’s fleet, operating from 26 dedicated distribution centers in the US, is vast with over 800 tractors and straight trucks and over 1000 trailers. The Coretex reefer fleet management solution provides the power to process data on a grand scale, and the granularity to take the headaches out of HOS compliance at a per-driver level.

 It also meets the very specific needs of GSF’s biggest customer – McDonald’s, which they have served since the 1950s. McDonald’s requires continuous temperature monitoring from the warehouse right through to the restaurant, with air and product temperature measures for frozen and refrigerated compartments, and detailed requirements for frequency and temperature change.

 The Coretex IBRIGHT solution provides that advanced functionality, along with remote reefer control and a host of other efficiency and management applications. Just as importantly, it has been developed over time to meet the evolving needs of GSF and its customers. Amongst those innovations have been the migration from first-generation in-cab devices to Coretex tablets, and the shift to a Continuous Temperature Monitoring (CTM) environment using a third-party algorithm and data aggregator, giving GSF management a single view of temperature data right across the cold chain. Coretex also developed a truck exterior display requested by GSF.

The Results — Improved operational performance

For GSF’s Tim Bates, reefer telematics is a journey and Coretex has been GSF’s partner all the way.

 “My overall experience with Coretex has been positive,” he says. “Data harvested by the Coretex units has given us a valuable look at our cold chain performances during transport. Using the trailer return air data for predictive analytics has been a game changer for GSF and has positioned us as industry leaders. By using IBRIGHT as part of our new predictive product temperature monitoring process we were able to save about $50,000 per month by not requiring drivers to probe product at each stop.”

 Bates anticipates further joint developments in GSF’s reefer fleet management technology. Electronic signatures and bar coding for product arrivals in-store may well be high on the list. In the meantime, he says, Coretex has been a “solid choice to make for a fleet”, now and into the future.