H&M Bay implements a cooler way of tracking temperature-controlled freight
For a cold storage provider whose goal is to quickly and efficiently load and unload trucks of temperature-controlled freight, a pallet tracking system is an absolute necessity.
For more than 30 years, H&M Bay has delivered nationwide temperature-controlled freight solutions. Headquartered in Federalsburg, Md., with six additional facilities across the United States, H&M Bay has an owner/operator network of more than 10,000 refrigerated and frozen less-than-truckload (LTL) carriers.
Challenges
For a cold storage provider whose goal is to quickly and efficiently load and unload trucks of temperature-controlled freight, a pallet tracking system is an absolute necessity. H&M Bay’s Federalsburg facility had long relied on a radio frequency identification (RFID) system to track pallets moving in and out of its warehouse. However, this system posed several issues. Often, it picked up the wrong tag or did not read the tag at all, since pallets were stacked and moved around via lifts. In these cases, employees had to manually enter pallet numbers into their lift computers. Yet, even if the tag was read properly, the process was slow. If it took too long to read the tag, workers would either manually enter the information or re-position the pallet and wait again for the reader to detect it. Also, readers and printers required frequent re-boots, which further affected productivity.