The challenge
The distributor was handling 340 cold-chain shipments per month across Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania — insulin pens, vaccines, and temperature-sensitive biologics destined for hospital pharmacies and government health facilities. The average shipment involved 14 handover points: warehouse, cold-room loading, vehicle transfer, border crossing, receiving facility cold store. At each handover, temperature was logged on paper by the person handing over.
The problem was gap coverage. Paper logs captured temperatures at handover, not between them. When product arrived degraded — and roughly 12% of high-value biologics was arriving outside acceptable range — the distributor had no way of knowing which leg of the journey had caused the excursion. Insurance claims were contested. Regulatory inspections were passed through paperwork that bore no relation to actual in-transit conditions. And the underlying losses — an estimated USD 2.8M per year — went unaddressed because they were unmeasurable.
What we built
We designed the system around three constraints specific to cross-border EAC operations: connectivity is intermittent (border crossings often have no data signal), power is unreliable (cold trucks run warm when the engine is off at border queues), and the regulatory framework differs by country (Kenya's PPB, Uganda's NDA, Tanzania's TFDA each have their own GDP requirements).
The sensor layer uses Bluetooth Low Energy loggers with 90-day battery life that cache readings locally when offline and sync automatically when connectivity resumes. Each shipment gets a tamper-evident logger sealed at dispatch. The platform ingests readings every 15 minutes; a rules engine raises a real-time WhatsApp and email alert to both the driver and the operations centre the moment a temperature excursion begins — not when it's confirmed at destination.
The operations dashboard shows every active shipment on a live map with a colour-coded temperature status. For biologics with a narrow 2–8°C window, the platform also models cumulative exposure using the Mean Kinetic Temperature method (as required by WHO-GDP), automatically calculating whether a product with a border-queue excursion is still within acceptable cumulative exposure limits or must be quarantined.
Regulatory audit coverage
Each shipment's full temperature record — every 15-minute reading, every excursion event, every corrective action taken — is stored immutably and exportable as a PDF or JSON certificate of condition. During a PPB inspection six months after go-live, the distributor produced complete chain-of-custody temperature records for a requested shipment in under three minutes. The inspector noted it was the first time in her career that a Kenyan distributor had provided continuous in-transit data rather than handover-point logs.
"Before this, we knew we had a problem but we couldn't prove where it was happening or whose responsibility it was. Now we can see every degree, every minute. The losses have dropped, the insurance position has improved, and we pass inspections on substance, not paperwork."