How it is evidenced
Temperature excursions: what happens when the range is breached
It is reported before delivery, not after. An excursion is handled as a formal deviation: logged with its time, duration and extreme value, passed to the customer to decide on the product, and investigated for root cause.
What is a temperature excursion?
It is any departure from the declared storage range, above or below, for however long. There are no small excursions that do not count: there are excursions with different impact on the product, and whoever assesses that impact is the Marketing Authorisation Holder with the stability data in hand. The carrier supplies the exact record of what happened; it does not rule on whether the product is still usable.
How is it detected?
- Unit alarm
- The cooling unit alerts the driver in the cab as soon as temperature drifts from setpoint.
- Traffic desk monitoring
- The office sees the fleet in real time and receives the alert without depending on the driver calling in.
- Continuous recording
- Two independent probes capture the full episode, not one isolated value.
The combination of the three is what allows a reaction during the journey. A single-use logger inside the pallet documents the excursion but does not announce it: it is read on opening, when there is nothing left to do.
In what order is it handled?
- Contain: driver and traffic desk act on the immediate cause — setpoint, unit, door — to shorten the episode.
- Report: the customer is informed before delivery, with the data available at that point.
- Document: start time, duration, maximum or minimum value reached and circumstances.
- Hand over the evidence: the full trip graph travels with the delivery paperwork.
- Investigate: root cause is analysed within the ISO 9001:2015 quality system and, where appropriate, the procedure or the equipment is corrected.
Where do excursions actually happen?
Almost never on the road. In order of frequency, the points where they appear are:
- The dock: waiting with doors open at loading or unloading, above all in summer.
- The un-cooled trailer: loading cold product into a box at ambient temperature raises product temperature before the vehicle even moves.
- The wait at destination: arriving within range and waiting hours for a free bay.
- Equipment failure: real, but far less frequent than the three above.
Three of the four have nothing to do with the vehicle and everything to do with how loading and unloading are organised, which is where a carrier with its own procedure makes the difference. See pre-cooling and cold chain control.
Frequently asked questions
Is an excursion of a few minutes still reported?
Yes. The criterion is leaving the range, not the duration, because the impact is assessed by the customer with their stability data, not by the carrier using its judgement. Hiding a short episode is what turns a minor incident into a major audit finding.
What happens to the product after an excursion?
It is placed at the customer’s disposal, in whatever condition it is in, and is not delivered as though nothing had happened. Their quality department decides whether to accept it, quarantine it or reject it, and that decision is documented. What is never done is delivering without notice and letting it surface in the record later.
Can the excursion history of a lane be reviewed?
Yes. Records are retained for five years and can be retrieved by shipment or by period, which lets a customer analyse the trend of a specific corridor instead of looking at isolated incidents.
Need a full truck for pharmaceutical or refrigerated freight?
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