ASX listed CCP Technologies (ASX: CT1), which has built its business to date on monitoring the temperature of commercial refrigeration units, is now exploiting data analytics and blockchain to enable it to offer proactive refrigeration maintenance and food tracking and provenance services.
Details of the latest initiatives were announced by CEO Michael White at the company’s AGM. He said CCP had implemented a data analytics platform to analyse data received from each of its smart tags to establish data patterns or trends.
“When any new data is found to deviate from the established trend, the system creates a notification. CCP’s support staff determine the cause of the trend deviation and then update the system” he said.
“This underpins a process of machine learning, whereby the system itself becomes increasingly adept at predicting changes in the performance of monitored equipment.”
Maintenance partnership planned
White said that when its smart tags had been deployed for more than six months or so, the CCP platform could accurately predict if a freezer or cooler was running inefficiently or likely to fail. “Armed with this information, it is possible to undertake proactive maintenance to improve operating efficiencies or avert failures.”
Armed with these insights, he said CCP was looking to establish a fully managed service to the cold chain industry in Australia.
“With the support of partners that currently provide refrigeration maintenance and other field services, we can deploy our platform to provide the predictive data and information required to manage a new proactive services model. This will involve an operations centre to manage the field service response to performance issues identified by the CCP analytics platform.”
Penta blockchain partnership
White said CCP’s plans to exploit blockchain followed an investment in the company from Penta Global, a blockchain connector that provides interoperability between blockchain and existing IT systems.
Penta Global, which has a large development team in China, has built a blockchain for rice growers that is claimed to enable growers’, harvesters’, milling, transport and retail data to be stored on the blockchain.
White said CCP was partnering with Penta Global to add quantitative shelf-life predictability and customer desirability ratings to its offerings.
“Penta and CCP are now collaborating to extend opportunities into both the US and Chinese food supply chain markets, and we have created a working ‘farm to fork’ demonstration for the perishable food supply chain.”
Also, he said CCP and Penta were working with the University of Melbourne to combine biometrics and gas chromatography with machine learning to ‘close the loop’ in the food chain from producer to end consumer.
He added: “There is no doubt that blockchain will play an increasingly important role in the food industry as large food companies seek to improve supply chain visibility, integrity and efficiency. In September of this year, Walmart announced that all suppliers of leafy vegetables must be on the blockchain within the next 12 months if they intend to continue their supply contracts.”
