Client:
9 White Deer Brewery is a West Cork Brewing Company, setup and run by Gordon Lucey and Don O’ Leary. They are one of the most innovative craft breweries in Ireland and have become famous for producing their gluten free beer range. In West Cork, they brew 9 award winning beers in house, ranging from Stout to IPA’s.
Business Challenge:
The owners of 9 White Deer needed a way to ensure the brewing process was always in control and monitored. With Craft Beers growing in popularity, a large number of new brewery’s have setup in recent years. Initial investment goes into the brewing equipment, and 9 White Deer brewery was no different. They now have 8 fermenters, 2 bright tanks and cold storage rooms, internal and external.
During the brewing process, control of the beer temperature is critical. 9 White Deer brewery have all their equipment controlled by wired PLC controllers, however, they have no remote monitoring of process. At night, or over the weekend when brewing staff are not present there was no way of knowing if everything was going to plan. If there was an issue with the temperature control, it’s possible to lose thousands of Euro of beer.
There is also internal and external cold storage for the finished product. Its important to keep the products cool during the summer months in particular. The external cold storage at 9 White Deer is a reefer container, and ensuring that the compressor turns on in the early mornings before the daily temperature started to rise is important to Gordon.
9 White Deer were looking for a cost effective solution to monitor their process in real time, and give them peace of mind that their production is running as it should. They also want to ensure the colds storage units are working when required and not spoiling finished product before delivery.
Solution
Remote Signals provided 9 white deer with TempReporter IoT devices and software solution. The sensors were sent directly to Gordon, and he was able to install himself in minutes. Once the sensors were installed on the brewery equipment, he downloaded the Remote Signals App and quickly setup his dashboard and alert parameters for upper and lower temperatures.
The brewing equipment in 9 white deer brewery was connected quickly and easily, and Gordon and the team have the ability in real time to view the operating conditions in the brewery on their mobile phones and through the Remote Signals web dashboard. If any temperatures are observed outside the desired range, the 9 white deer team is immediately notified.
Client:
Billy Lane opened his first pharmacy in Limerick on Davis St in 1990 and has been serving the people of Limerick since then, and is now a member of the Haven group since June 2015.
Haven Pharmacy is a group of independent pharmacists who have come together to provide Irish families with invaluable health advice. They are the leading, fastest-growing independent co-operative pharmacy group in Ireland with over 100 pharmacists, over 300 staff, practising in urban and rural areas - and dispensing more medicines than any other pharmacy group in Ireland.
Business Challenge:
In order to maintain efficacy, vaccines must be kept at proper storage temperatures, specifically between 2°C and 8°C. Temperature control is extremely important for vaccines, as any deviation outside the recommended temperatures risks the quality of the vaccine, and in turn, the safety of the patient. All businesses handling temperature sensitive medicines must follow recommendations and best practices for managing, storing, and monitoring.
This is often a manual process, and requires staff in busy businesses such as pharmacies to perform a temperature check on several times a day on temperature controlled medicine cabinets. This is in line with regulation and when a measurement is taken, it must be recorded. This is often done on pre-printed templates or in a notebook where temperatures are logged.
The process is very manual, and requires a staff member to leave the pharmacy serving area, and perform the checks. The timing for checking the temperatures can vary day to day depending on the busyness of the pharmacy. And during hours that the pharmacy is closed, at night and during weekends, there is no method of knowing if the temperatures are within the acceptable levels.
When Government Health and Safety officers come to audit the pharmacy to ensure compliance, all temperature logs must be in presented to the official for review. This is done by presenting a folder full of sheets and notebooks where logs were kept.
Quiet often, there can be €5k - €10k worth of medicines in a pharmacy fridge. When the storage temperature falls outside the required 2°C to 8°C the medicines need to be quarantined and checked. This is a timely and costly process and requires backup stock to be ordered while this process is being undertaken.
Billy Lane was looking for a reliable cost effective solution to monitor his pharmacy’s medical fridge and improve compliance logging. He wanted 24/7 monitoring, alerts directly to his phone should any issues begin to occur, so he could move stock if problems arose. It was also important that the temperature reports could be easily accessed online and printed in a neat manor for the audit file.
