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The primary purpose of temperature monitoring devices is to protect the integrity and quality of stored goods, products and samples.
With temperature wielding such a significant impact on the safety of end products, temperature monitoring devices have interwoven with regulatory guidelines, quality control measures, business maintenance and risk assessment procedures.
Ensuring adherence to regulations, prevention of equipment failures and avoidance of product losses are just some of the reasons why Withnell Sensors are offering FREE health checks for SenseAnywhere data loggers in January!
Who benefits from temperature monitoring devices?
In environments where temperature must be stringently monitored, temperature monitoring devices must accurately read, record, store, and report temperature data.
The management of analogue devices has a history of being a pedantic yet essential task. This steered the transformative digitalisation of temperature monitoring, employing automated solutions over manual ones.
These digital devices bring value to several highly regulated markets. Including:
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The pharmaceutical industry
Employed primarily for regulatory and operational obligations, temperature monitoring devices can be found in countless storage environments throughout the supply chain, from warehouses and walk in chambers to fridges and freezers.
Mobile temperature monitoring devices are largely present within the pharmaceutical setting, using the transportation of medicinal products for remote hospital or veterinary care as an example.
They ensure that not only has the integrity of vital therapeutics not been compromised but that automatic data transfers of temperature records run seamlessly in the background without the need for intervention from staff.
Life sciences
The wider life science industry also retains temperature monitoring devices for regulatory temperature control. This includes a range of subsectors ranging from healthcare, medical, veterinary and R&D.
Used for the transportation of blood components, for example, data loggers provide accurate measurements and readings which help maintain product quality during the journey between medical facilities for emergency situations.
Biological storage facilities such as biobanks and biorepositories also naturally require extensive and highly regulated temperature control measures for safe preservation of samples and reagents.
Aerospace, Engineering and Industrial Applications
Our team have also implemented temperature monitoring devices for a magnitude of other applications which includes the more technical and industrial requirements.
Loggers are often needed when it comes to the storage of electronic components for example, as well as to monitor IT infrastructures, server rooms and other environments of where outages can pose a threat on a business-wide scale.
Food and Beverage
Temperature monitoring has become as stringently regulated in the food and beverage sector as it is in the pharmaceutical sector. Our Engineers do particularly enjoy the vast and expansive range of food businesses who work with us to ensure their temperature data is being logged.
Businesses ranging from a global crisp manufacturer to a pizza manufacturer and even a chocolate factory, rely on data loggers to ensure that their fresh produce and process manufactured goods aren’t compromised.
The engineering team at Withnell Sensors have implemented temperature monitoring devices in many unique settings, with requirements ranging from the monitoring of internal temperatures in beehives to the precise monitoring of an ice cream retailers freezer temperatures!
With so many businesses and organisations reliant on accurate temperature readings, management and integration with wider environment monitoring, the temperature monitoring device itself must be maintained and checked to ensure it is performing its duties efficiently.
Maintenance of your temperature monitoring device
When it comes to the maintenance of your data loggers, many sectors will operate with two maintenance systems in mind: these are preventative maintenance or predictive maintenance (PdM).
Preventative maintenance:
Typically conducted in scientific and consumed product markets, predictive maintenance refers to the process of performing regular, scheduled maintenance to avoid and prevent unexpected failures from happening in the future.
By scheduling regular checks and establishing a routine for calibration, you can ensure that your equipment is guaranteed to run without deviation throughout a specific time period. This enables the detection of any anomalies before they could cause any serious detriment.
Predictive maintenance:
Often undertaken within industrial settings, predictive maintenance involves wider conditional monitoring and data assessment to predict a piece of equipment’s failure before it occurs.
This process involves the analyses of historical data of your logger to determine patterns in readings within seasonal periods, for example, which can help anticipate when data logger maintenance should be completed, i.e before the next season etc.
Why is maintenance of temperature monitoring devices important?
Equipment and instrumentation can have a direct or indirect effect on business operations. Repair strategies are typically put in place based on the impact of the piece of equipment that may have failed, with those that have much bigger cost implications at face value often being prioritised.
To give an example, failure to a piece of manufacturing equipment will have an obvious cost impact not only from the cost associated with fixing the issue but with the downtime required that will subsequently reduce output.
This means that temperature monitoring devices often fall short in regard to repair plans, preventative maintenance and general health checks, this is because the consequences of their failure are not always directly visible.
If a data logger has not been calibrated, it could potentially misread the temperature of a storage unit, an entire warehouse or a bulk biosample chamber, which means an entire batch of goods could be spoiled and unable to be distributed.
In many of the settings Withnell Sensors serves, this could be detrimental.
If you become aware that deviations and external risks pose a threat to your monitoring system in consecutive time periods, then a predictive maintenance schedule can help ensure effects of anticipated failures are low. For example, one of our customers approached us off the back of an emergency situation whereby extreme weather had caused cooling fans to fail which resulted in critical IT infrastructure overheating.
Not only did they suffer from loss of data, but they also experienced severe downtime and a critical outage across their business. Predictive maintenance would recognise such weather conditions in the future and ensure that a health check, calibration and many other checklist actions had been completed ahead of time ensuring live data of current temperatures as precise during vulnerable conditions.
With this in mind, repair strategies that consider both direct and indirect impacts of equipment, as well as preventative and predictive maintenance requirements are likely to be the most successful at safeguarding your products.
How is maintenance conducted on temperature monitoring systems?
Along with a standard calibration routine, Withnell Sensors recommends regular health checks for the assurance that your temperature monitoring system is running correctly.
Regardless of whether each individual health check is scheduled or ad hoc, a check up can be conducted on your temperature monitoring system at any time and in accordance with either method of preventative or predictive maintenance.
Throughout January, the expert engineering team at Withnell Sensors are on hand to deliver a free health check assessment for the ultimate piece of mind regarding your SenseAnywhere. Our free assessments cover:
- Confirmation of alarm settings
- Assessment of reporting settings
- Checking of access point functionality
- Assessing signal strength
- Calibration status
Not only this, but our specialist team can go above and beyond to offer refresher training for any personnel at the facility, as well as ensure user configuration aspects including the confirmation of system email addresses, report configurations and asset tag information.
