The cold room at 1am, and the name on it by morning

What the shift does today

Someone walks the corridor with a torch, reads a gauge, and writes a number in a book that stays in the pocket of a jacket. If the room is high, the message goes to a WhatsApp group. By 6am the message has scrolled, and the manager opening the door does not know whether anyone touched the setpoint.

Packhouses along the Naivasha, Limuru and Nairobi–Mombasa corridors already run this way. The cost shows up later, as a downgraded lot or a buyer who asks for a history the book cannot produce. This is an operating pattern, not a customer of ours. We are not publishing case studies we do not have.

What the product already describes

Cold rooms and packhouses are one of the example workflows on the FactoraERP IoT page. Each room sits on the live sensor floor and on the floor map. When an alert is raised, a manager can check from a phone whether it has been acknowledged, and by whom.

That is the part you can take as product: one screen, one list, a name. Large touch targets, because the person acknowledging is often standing in the corridor, not at a desk. Desktop, tablet and phone are all in that description.

What we will not pretend

Door open and closed is a signal on the floor, next to temperature and humidity. A probe in the pulp of the product rather than in the air is a placement decision, not a different product. When the cloud link drops, the gateway buffers and syncs later. A battery across a power cut is not what that sentence means, and the gateway’s make and model are still unpublished.

The sample temperature log on the compliance page shows the columns a morning meeting actually needs. It is a sample, labelled as one. Use it to judge the shape of the record, not as proof that your inspector will accept it.

A sensible first room

One cold room, four points, the band you already run (often 0–4°C for fresh produce), and a named person on the night shift. The example cold-room software bundle on the pricing page is priced for that shape, in shillings, and it is still a draft.

Bring a photo of the panel and the room names your team uses. Twenty minutes is enough to see whether the live floor matches the corridor.