The encyclopedia · Engineering & Operations · Technical decision · 2018-2025
Maersk watches every reefer so a bad cargo is caught early
Remote Container Management streams temperature, humidity and O2/CO2 from each reefer so a shipment can be saved before it spoils.
Maersk
the move
Fresh, chilled or controlled-atmosphere cargo fails silently: by the time a container is opened it may already be too late, and no one knew while it was at sea.
Maersk's Remote Container Management adds sensors and connectivity to the reefer fleet and streams near-real-time data back, so the operations team and the customer can see the state of the box during transit.
The product Captain Peter then surfaces that data to customers, and the system will alert on issues so a decision can be made while the box is still moving.
why it works
- Continuous data lets an anomaly (temperature, humidity or gas level) be caught while it can still be fixed.
- Watching the box at sea removes the cost and risk of discovering a spoiled shipment at the dock.
- Customers get visibility into their own cargo, which builds trust and reduces disputes.
- The data can be used to decide, mid-voyage, whether to reroute or re-handle a shipment.
what transfers
If a bad outcome is discovered too late to fix, the value is in sensing earlier. Move the point of detection to the moment the condition starts to drift, not to the moment the cargo arrives.
what came after
Remote Container Management became the infrastructure behind Captain Peter and was rolled out across the joint Maersk and Hamburg Süd reefer fleet. Maersk has described upgrading onboard connectivity to increase the frequency of data updates, and ships and containers are being equipped so the monitoring reaches nearly all modern reefers.
references
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