Cold chain transport and shipment monitoring
In transit you lose the two things a monitoring system usually relies on: mains power and a network. What you cannot lose is the record — or the ability of the receiving site to read it without calling you.
Distribution is where most cold chains actually fail, and where evidence is hardest to collect. A shipment changes hands several times, spends hours on an apron or at a customs bay, and arrives at a site that has no relationship with your monitoring platform. Whoever signs for it has to make a release decision from whatever record travelled with the box.
That splits the problem in two. For one-way domestic and export lanes the cheapest compliant answer is a single-use logger that produces a self-contained, verifiable report on arrival. For high-value or long lanes the answer is live telemetry — LTE with GNSS, flight mode for the air leg, and excursion alerts while there is still time to intervene. Reusable multi-use loggers sit between the two on a closed distribution loop.
Abhilekh covers all three modes on one platform, so the trip record lands in the same audit chain as your warehouse and fridge records rather than in a separate vendor portal.
The expectations behind the record
What an inspector or auditor looks for in this use case, and the framework each expectation comes from.
Transport conditions maintained and documented end to end
Shipping conditions must be defined, the route qualified, and the actual conditions during transport recorded — including handovers, where responsibility and evidence most often break down.
Air freight handled under time- and temperature-sensitive rules
Healthcare shipments moving by air are handled under IATA's temperature-control regulations, with lithium-cell transport rules applying to the loggers themselves.
A record the receiving site can verify independently
The consignee's release decision should not depend on trusting a report emailed by the shipper. A tamper-evident, self-contained arrival record removes that dependency.
Excursion assessment before release, documented after
Where the band was breached, the assessment against product stability data, the disposition and its signature belong on the same record as the readings that triggered it.
The failure modes nobody budgets for
Every one of these is a real reason monitoring programmes lose their audit trail — or lose the trust of the people who work with them.
Arrival records nobody can open
A proprietary logger that needs the shipper's installer, licence or portal login turns a five-minute release check into a support ticket and a delay on a temperature-sensitive delivery.
Excursions discovered days later
An offline logger tells you what happened after it is too late to act. On a high-value lane that is an expensive way to learn about a failed reefer unit.
Loggers that cost more than the margin on the shipment
Live tracking on every carton is not economics. Matching logger class to lane value is the difference between a programme that scales and one that gets quietly dropped.
Air legs where the radio must be off
A cellular logger that keeps transmitting is a compliance problem on an aircraft, and one that stops logging when the radio is off is a gap in the record.
Engineered for this, specifically
Each point below maps to a documented platform behaviour — not a marketing promise.
A trip report that opens on any PC, signed
Plug an offline logger in and it enumerates a FAT16 drive with README.TXT, DATA.CSV and an ECDSA P-256-signed REPORT.PDF. The consignee verifies the trip without an account, an installer or a call to the shipper.
Logger class matched to lane value
ABH-100-SL is the lean temperature-only disposable, ABH-100-S the fuller single-use record, ABH-100-M the reusable workhorse for closed loops, and ABH-100-G the live LTE Cat-1 and GNSS tracker for high-value lanes.
Flight mode on the air leg, alerts on the ground
ABH-100-G suspends transmission for the air segment while continuing to log, then reports on landing — so the aircraft rule is respected and the record has no hole in it.
Handling evidence alongside temperature
ABH-300-SH adds shock and tilt on an accelerometer channel, which is what turns a damage dispute from an argument into a record. ABH-300-GPS covers roaming industrial assets.
Trip records join the same audit chain as your sites
Harvested and streamed trips both land in the SHA-256 chain behind your warehouse and fridge records, so distribution evidence is not stranded in a separate vendor portal.
The ABH loggers for this job
Abhilekh runs its own logger line end to end — one manufacturer owns the chain from probe accuracy to the signed record.
- ▸PRB-PT100-3W — Class-A immersion probe for frozen and dry-ice shipments
The ABH line is at the design-frozen, pre-production stage. Every battery-life, drop, thermal and IP figure is a calculated or simulated design estimate, and the regulatory marks referenced on this site are a certification roadmap — not held certificates.
Questions, answered
Other environments we monitor
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