The alarm was raised at 02:14 and read at 07:40
A trailer parked at a customer's site overnight, loaded for an early drop, has a fridge unit that shuts down on a fault. The unit raises an alarm. The telematics portal logs it and sends an email to the transport inbox, along with forty other notifications from that night: door opens, low fuel, geofence entries.
The night planner, if there is one, is dealing with drivers. By the time someone reads the alarm in the morning, the load has been warm for hours and the customer is about to reject it.
Why alarms go unseen
The alarm system works. The routing does not. Every event from every unit goes to the same place, in the same format, and the important ones are buried.
- All telematics notifications go to one shared inbox.
- Genuine temperature alarms look the same as routine door and fuel events.
- There is no on-call rota tied to the alerts.
- Nobody knows if an alarm has been seen, so nobody knows to escalate.
- Actions taken are not recorded against the alarm.
What a missed alarm costs
A rejected load is the direct cost: product, collection, disposal and a redelivery if one can be made. The customer relationship takes a knock, and repeated incidents can put contracts at risk.
Even when the product is fine, not being able to show that an alarm was seen and acted on makes every conversation with the customer harder.
How we get the right alarm to the right person
- We take the event feed from your reefer telematics and, if you want, your cold store monitoring, into one alarm service.
- Rules you set decide what matters: temperature outside the load's range for longer than a set time, unit shutdown, communication loss while loaded. Routine events are logged but not alerted.
- Alarms go to the on-call person from a rota you maintain, by phone call and text, with the unit, the load, the customer and the location.
- The person acknowledges with one tap. If nobody acknowledges within the time you set, the alarm escalates to the next person.
- Actions are recorded against the alarm: driver called, unit restarted, load moved, customer informed.
- Every alarm, acknowledgement and action is kept, so you can show the history to a customer or auditor.
| Event | Treatment |
|---|---|
| Door opened at a drop | Logged, no alert |
| Temperature out of range briefly | Logged, alert if it persists |
| Unit shutdown while loaded | Immediate call to on-call |
| Unit stopped reporting while loaded | Alert after the time you set |
The thresholds and the response are yours, set by your quality team and your customers' requirements. We make sure the alarm is delivered and the response recorded.
What the night shift looks like after
The on-call person gets a small number of alerts that matter, with enough detail to act immediately. If they are asleep and miss it, the next person gets the call. In the morning, every alarm has a record of what happened, and the transport inbox is back to being useful.
Are your alarms reaching anyone?
- Temperature alarms go to a shared email inbox.
- Alarms at night are found the next morning.
- Real alarms are buried among routine notifications.
- There is no escalation if an alarm is missed.
- You cannot show a customer what was done about an alarm.