Industry
Manufacturing and Transport Refrigeration
Turning Refrigeration Failures into Predictive Intelligence Across a 100,000-Container Global Cold Chain
reduction in operational costs and waste across the global container fleet
improvement in container availability through proactive fault detection
guaranteed equipment uptime
A Fortune 100 manufacturer was losing product and revenue to refrigeration equipment failures across a massive global cold chain fleet. Scarce technicians, long container waits at dock locations, and $150B industry-wide food waste annually made reactive monitoring untenable. Altimetrik co-created a Microsoft Azure cold chain solution that processes data from 100,000+ global containers using predictive algorithms across 40+ factors and 10 alarm types, enabling real-time intervention to prevent spoiled shipments.
Refrigerated containers fail. When they do fail in transit, or during long waits at hot dock locations, the product inside is at risk. This leads to the client absorbing the consequences in spoilage, secondary damage claims, and lost availability. Cold chain technicians were in short supply, so response depended on someone qualified reaching the right container in time.
The monitoring model was reactive: a fault surfaced once it had already become a problem. Across a fleet of over 100,000 containers spread across the globe, that model did not scale, and it left the client managing outcomes it could not see coming.
Cold chain failures are tied to roughly $150B in annual food waste across the industry. For a manufacturer whose customers depend on guaranteed temperature integrity, every avoidable failure is both a direct cost and a reliability claim the client can no longer make. Prediction, not faster reaction, was the only path to changing the economics.
Altimetrik partnered with the client to co-create a cold chain monitoring solution on the Microsoft Azure Services Platform, taking end-to-end ownership of the solution.
The team built predictive fault algorithms monitoring more than 40 operational factors and 10 alarm types, designed to flag developing failures before equipment breaks down. The platform ingests and processes device telemetry from over 100,000 containers globally, operating at fleet scale rather than as a per-asset tool.
That intelligence surfaces through real-time, intuitive dashboards that give operations teams a live view of fleet health and enable proactive intervention as in dispatching a technician, rerouting a container, or correcting a setpoint while there is still time to protect the load.
▪ 60% reduction in operational costs and waste
▪ 8% reduction in secondary damage claims
▪ 45% improvement in container availability
▪ Proactive fault detection across 40+ monitored factors and 10 alarm types
▪ Faster turnaround on assets that would previously have failed in service
▪ 99.9% guaranteed equipment uptime
▪ Real-time visibility across 100,000+ containers globally
▪ Reactive monitoring replaced with predictive intervention
Altimetrik owned the solution end to end, from Azure architecture through predictive algorithms to the dashboard operations that teams use every day. The result runs at a genuine fleet scale and converts a reactive service model into a predictive one, without asking the client to add technicians it could not hire.
