The printout from the cooling unit is not evidence. It shows one thing only. A vehicle sat in the corridor on a given day. Not that this one shipment sat inside it. HACCP asks for cold chain evidence per shipment in refrigerated transport. Refrigerated transport mostly delivers evidence per vehicle. The gap between the two is the real point. It usually only shows up at a complaint.
My observation from several cold chain projects: nobody argues with the standard. Everyone argues about the boundary. Vehicle or shipment. That is where the actual work sits.
HACCP traces back to the Codex Alimentarius. The EU made it binding in 2004. Regulation (EC) 852/2004, Article 5 lists seven steps. Find the hazards. Set the critical points. Set the limits. Build a real monitoring step. Set a correction, in case a value breaks. Check the rules again and again. Write it all down.
In refrigerated transport, the critical point is the trailer temperature. The limit is the corridor the customer and the carrier agreed on. For deep frozen goods, the rule gets tighter. Regulation (EC) 37/2005, Article 2 sets out a recording duty. Dated. Kept for a year. Longer, depending on the goods. From 2006 on, only with devices under EN 12830, EN 13485 and EN 13486. For chilled goods without frozen status, this one rule does not apply directly. The core of Article 5 in 852/2004 still does.
Whoever certifies beyond that meets IFS Logistics. Version 3, in force since December 2023. It wants a recording system. At fixed intervals. If a value breaks out, an alarm fires. Plus a correction, so the goods stay safe. None of the three sources says how the evidence gets broken down to one shipment. That part stays with the carrier.
The logger in the cooling unit writes its own curve. With no link to the load. It knows only the vehicle and the time. The TMS knows the shipment. Who sent it. When it went on, when it came off. It does not know the temperature. Telematics knows the place and time of the vehicle. Neither the shipment nor the temperature. No single one of the three sources carries the full HACCP record on its own.
Three sources. Each with one part of the picture. On a run with six or eight stops, these parts stay apart. Until someone joins them. Today that mostly happens once a customer flags a breach. Then dispatch pulls the curve for the whole day. And hunts by hand for the stretch. Between loading and unloading of the one shipment that matters.
This is not a question of will. It is a question of the key. The key is missing: vehicle, time window, shipment. Without it, each source stays right on its own. Put together, they stay silent.
We build automation for forwarders anyway. The HACCP record falls out of it almost for free. The match needs three fields. Vehicle. Time window. Shipment. The TMS gives the time window. From loading to unloading. For this one shipment, on this one vehicle. Telematics checks the place. Did the vehicle really stand at the dock? The logger gives the curve for that exact window. The result: a curve tied to a number. Not to a vehicle day.
The process runs per shipment. Not per vehicle. Each finished shipment gets a record. Lowest value. Highest value. Time outside the corridor, in minutes. If it all sits inside the corridor, the evidence moves on by itself. To quality assurance. Or straight to the customer. No request. No search.
If a shipment falls outside, a case opens on the spot. With a status. New. In review. Closed. Not at month end, when the customer calls. The alert carries a time, a duration and a shipment number. Not a bare line saying truck 14 ran warm.
The process also has to handle gaps. A logger that sends nothing between two stops is not an edge case. It is a normal Tuesday. The gap gets its own category: no data. Not "within range." That difference matters in an audit. And in quality assurance too.
In dispatch, the complaint day changes the most. Right now the search only starts with the call. Now the case sits there already, with a status attached. The complaint starts with an answer. Not with a search.
For quality assurance, the export becomes routine. Once a week or once a month. Not a special task anymore. The auditor gets a table: shipment number, time window, result. Not a stack of printouts that still needs sorting.
Day to day dispatch work changes the least. The match runs in the background. It only becomes visible once a case opens. But right then, every minute counts. Before the customer calls.
Three honest limits.
Not every refrigerated trailer keeps its zones clean. Some vehicles run two temperature zones in one trailer. Without a separate sensor per zone, the match stays rough. It shows the curve for the whole trailer. Not for one zone.
Not every handover fits a clean time window. Some shipment changes vehicles at a cross dock. If the exact handover time is not in the TMS, the window turns into an estimate. The record gets weaker then. Not wrong.
And a data match is not a decision. Which corridor applies? How far may a value drift? Which correction kicks in? Quality assurance sets that. Under its own HACCP rules. Not the agent. Automation gives the basis for the evidence. Not the limits themselves.
A time window per shipment, from the TMS. A check against the telematics track, for the dock. An export of the curve, for that exact window. A separate category for gaps, apart from "within range." A status for every breach, not just an alert mail. None of this is exotic. What is new is only the level: per shipment. Not per vehicle.
How long does your quality team need today for one curve tied to one shipment? Send me the number. Then I will show you in a process check how the evidence builds itself instead.
