Fleet Management Software for Cold Chain Logistics
You are not selling a delivery. You are selling an unbroken temperature, and the customer buys the paperwork that proves it. KO Fleetz holds the two things that decide whether you can: the condition of a refrigeration unit that runs on its own fuel and its own schedule, and the record of every minute the doors were open.
Operational reality
What makes cold chain logistics different
A drift of two degrees is a write-off
Chilled product that went warm looks perfect. It arrives on the pallet indistinguishable from good stock, and the only reason anyone knows is a number on a chart. Nothing is salvageable and nothing is negotiable.
There are two engines and only one gets serviced
The refrigeration unit has its own hour meter, its own belts, its own coils and frequently its own diesel tank. Fleets book the tractor into a bay religiously and let the fridge run until it stops in July.
The cold leaves through the doors
A fourteen-drop chilled round opens the back fourteen times, often onto a warm loading yard. Set point never changed. Air temperature did. The unit spends the whole afternoon recovering ground it lost in ninety seconds.
Loading warm product into a warm trailer
A refrigeration unit removes heat; it does not create cold on demand. Skip the pre-cool, or load produce that was never chilled properly at the packhouse, and the trailer starts the journey already losing.
The record has to survive a year and an argument
Temperature data is not management information here. It is evidence, retained, produced on request, and read by a food-safety auditor or a claims handler who was not there and does not trust you.
Responsibility is written down, or it lands on you
Who sets the temperature, who verifies the pre-cool, who monitors in transit: these are contractual allocations between shipper and carrier. Where the agreement is vague, the party holding the data usually holds the loss.
What a chilled operation is actually doing all day
Before anything is loaded, the box has to be cold and the unit has to have been proven cold. That verification is the cheapest control in the entire chain and the one most often waved through by a yard under pressure at four in the morning. A trailer that reads correctly on the display because the probe is sitting in the one cold corner is not pre-cooled. It is a claim waiting for a reason.
Then the vehicle runs and the refrigeration unit runs, and they are two separate machines having two separate days. The tractor accumulates distance. The unit accumulates hours whenever it is on, which includes the four hours it spent humming on a trailer parked in a yard with nothing coupled to it. Its fuel comes out of its own tank, so it never appears in any figure derived from tractor consumption, and the litres quietly vanish from the cost model.
At each drop, cold is spent. The doors open, warm air rolls in along the floor, the driver walks cases out, and the unit works hard to claw the temperature back before the next stop takes it away again. What separates a fleet that can defend itself from one that cannot is whether that story exists as a timestamped series afterwards: set point, return air, door open, door shut, position. Without it, a rejected consignment becomes your word against a receiver's thermometer.
Feature mapping
Which modules matter here, and why
Not every fleet needs every module. This is what actually earns its place in this industry.
The refrigeration unit is the asset that decides whether the load survives, and it is invisible to a chassis service schedule. It runs on hours rather than kilometres, its belts and condenser coils fail on their own timeline, and a defrost cycle that has stopped working properly degrades slowly enough that nobody notices until a customer does.
Your sensors are the product. A probe that drifted, a door reed switch that stopped reporting in April, a gateway that silently dropped a trailer three weeks ago: each one turns a defensible record into a gap on a chart at exactly the moment somebody wants to read it. Sensor health has to be watched as seriously as the cargo it watches.
An excursion without a location is half a story. Knowing the temperature climbed tells you there is a problem. Knowing it climbed while the vehicle stood at a consignee's yard for fifty minutes with the doors open tells you whose problem it is. Position and condition have to be one record, read together.
Chilled fleets carry a second fuel supply that nobody budgets for. The unit burns diesel while the vehicle is switched off, so consumption has no relationship to distance travelled, and every litres-per-kilometre figure you produce is describing a machine that is not the one costing you money.
A signature saying the cases arrived is worthless in this sector. What closes a chilled drop is the delivery outcome and the condition trace for that consignment sitting together, so the acceptance and the temperature it was accepted at form one artefact rather than two systems to be joined up later during a dispute.
Outcomes
What changes
- A condition trace, not a reading taken at the door
- Minute by minute
- The fridge serviced on its own hours, not the tractor's
- Two machines
- Where the cold was spent, timestamped and located
- Door by door
- Reefer diesel counted apart from tractor diesel
- Its own tank
What a chilled fleet needs wired together
Refrigeration unit manufacturers publish set point, return air and alarm codes through their own telemetry; KO Fleetz reads that stream rather than asking you to fit a second thermometer next to the first. Wireless probe and data-logger vendors supply pallet-level and multi-zone readings. Food-safety and quality management systems take the finished consignment trace for retention. Warehouse and order systems supply what was loaded at which temperature. Fuel cards, workshop suppliers and telematics units feed the cost and condition of the tractor underneath.
Explore integrationsFrequently asked questions
No. It gives you the record; compliance is a set of obligations you hold. Food transport rules turn on written agreements about who specifies the temperature, who verifies pre-cool and who monitors in transit, and they vary by jurisdiction and by what you carry. The platform captures readings, door events and positions, keeps them retrievable, and lets you produce a consignment trace on request. It does not draft your agreement with a shipper, interpret your regulator, or tell you what set point a product needs.
It shortens the gap between the drift starting and a human knowing, which is the only lever software actually has. An alarm the moment return air departs from set point, while the vehicle is still forty minutes from the consignee, is a phone call and a recoverable load. The same drift discovered at the goods-in bay is a write-off. What it cannot do is fix a failed compressor, close a perished door seal, or chill product that was loaded warm. Those are physical problems needing physical answers.
Please do not. The unit manufacturer's own telemetry is the authoritative source for set point, return air, supply air and alarm codes, and duplicating it with an aftermarket probe gives you two numbers that disagree and no way to adjudicate. KO Fleetz takes that feed as an input and joins it to the things the unit does not know: where the vehicle was, which consignment was aboard, when the doors moved, and when the unit is next due a service on its own hour meter.
They would, if every door event were treated the same, and that is the mistake to avoid. A door opening inside a consignee's geofence during a planned stop is the job working correctly and belongs in the log, not in someone's inbox. A door opening on a trunk road at 02:40, or staying open twenty-five minutes at a drop that normally takes four, is the exception worth waking someone for. Configure it that way from day one. An alert stream nobody reads is worse than no alerts at all.
Both are possible and they answer different questions. Fixed probes in a multi-zone body tell you what the air is doing where the probe hangs, which is what your unit controls to. Wireless loggers travelling with a pallet tell you what happened to that specific consignment, which is what a claim is about. Be honest about the limit: a probe reports its own position, not the middle of a stack, and a load packed badly enough to block airflow can read perfectly at the sensor while going wrong two metres away.
Separately, because it behaves nothing like tractor fuel. The unit draws from its own tank, runs at standstill, and its consumption tracks ambient temperature, set point and door discipline rather than distance. If that tank carries a level sensor, KO Fleetz trends it as its own series and attributes it against unit run hours. If it does not, you are reconciling deliveries against hours, which is coarse but still far better than folding the litres into a fleet average where they are invisible.
Bring us the last consignment you had rejected
We will reconstruct it from set point, door events and position, and show you the forty minutes where the argument was actually decided.