Cold Storage IT Support

The temperature alarm went off at 11:42 PM. The on-call tech got a page, drove in, found a tripped breaker in the engine room, and reset it. The product is fine. The recordkeeping isn't. When the FSMA auditor shows up next quarter and asks for the temperature log covering that incident, you need to hand them an export that shows exactly what happened, when it was detected, who responded, and what the remediation was. If your monitoring system can't produce that record cleanly, the audit gets uncomfortable.

The Systems That Run Your Operation

The refrigeration controls are the floor of the operation. Most cold storage facilities run a BMS or refrigeration control system from Emerson, Danfoss, or Carel, often with a SCADA layer on top. These systems are usually owned by your refrigeration contractor, not your IT vendor, which makes integration awkward.

Temperature monitoring is the other half. Sometimes it's built into the BMS, sometimes it's a separate platform: DicksonOne, SmartSense, Cooper-Atkins, Sonicu, Sensitech. Wired probes in every room, cellular or Wi-Fi gateways aggregating the data, a cloud portal for alarms and historical reporting.

The WMS lives on top of all this. Same systems as a dry warehouse, but with additional lot, expiration, and temperature attributes on every SKU. Pickers see temperature class on every line. Slotting algorithms account for freezer versus cooler versus dry.

Audit and compliance documentation is its own workload. USDA for meat and poultry, FDA for processed food, sometimes both. SQF, BRC, or GFSI certification requirements. The auditor wants temperature history, alarm logs, response logs, training records, sanitation logs, pest control logs. Most of it lives in a mix of vendor portals and shared drives.

Where Things Break

The temperature monitoring system loses its uplink. The cellular gateway in the back of the freezer loses signal, or the Wi-Fi AP that was supposed to cover that side of the building never quite did. The portal shows a sensor offline. If nobody is watching the portal, the offline state can persist for hours. When the auditor pulls the report later, the gap is in the record. You can explain it. You'd rather not have to.

Alarm escalation breaks down. The portal sent an email at 11:42 PM. The maintenance lead's email goes to a phone he silenced. The backup contact retired six months ago. The next person on the list doesn't see the email until 6 AM, by which point the room has been warm for seven hours. Product is at risk and the alarm chain didn't work.

The BMS and the IT network don't talk to each other cleanly. The refrigeration contractor set up the SCADA on a flat network with the BMS, the WMS lives on the corporate network, and the temperature monitoring system is on yet a third subnet. Integration requires a firewall change every time something new is added, and the firewall change requires someone who knows where the rule lives. Six months later, nobody does.

Audit recordkeeping is fragmented. Temperature logs are in one portal, alarm responses are in a spreadsheet, sanitation logs are on paper in a binder, training records are in your HRIS. When the auditor asks for the full record of an incident, your quality manager spends two days pulling it together.

How We Approach It

We treat your monitoring infrastructure as critical, because it is. Temperature monitoring uplinks get redundant paths where possible: wired Ethernet plus cellular fallback for the gateways, or cellular with a wired secondary. We monitor the monitor. If your monitoring portal stops receiving data from a gateway, we know about it and we tell you. The blind spot doesn't get to live for hours.

Alarm escalation gets documented and tested. We work with your operations and quality team to build a real escalation tree, get it into the monitoring vendor's portal, and run a tabletop test at least annually. When an alarm fires at 2 AM, the right people get reached, and there's a record of the chain.

We segment your networks and document the segmentation. BMS on its own VLAN with controlled paths to the IT side. WMS where the WMS belongs. Temperature monitoring with its own egress path so a corporate network outage doesn't take it down. The firewall rules live in documentation, not in someone's head.

We help your quality team build a single audit-ready source for incident records. Temperature data, alarm timestamps, response logs, and CAPA documentation pulled into one place so audit prep is a query, not a fire drill.

Talk to Us

If your temperature monitoring has been sending alarms to an email address you don't watch, or your last audit surfaced recordkeeping gaps you've been meaning to close, or you'd just like an honest look at how your IT and your refrigeration controls coexist, get in touch.