Overcoming Cold Chain Logistics Challenges with Business Central + Boltrics 3PL Dynamics

Cold chain logistics requires transporting and storing goods that require precise temperature control, such as pharmaceuticals, fresh food, or biotech products, and is notoriously complex. For 3PL providers and their customers, the stakes are high: Product spoilage, regulatory infractions, reputational damage, and financial loss all loom large. These challenges are compounded when multiple stakeholders are involved, including transport, storage, distribution, and picking and packing.

Management, financial, and IT teams must work together to maintain cold chain integrity while controlling costs and ensuring compliance. Below are the key challenges in cold chain logistics, along with how a combined solution using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Boltrics 3PL Dynamics software can provide scalable, sustainable solutions.

Key challenges in cold chain logistics

Temperature control and monitoring gaps –Cold chain goods are sensitive to temperature fluctuations. Transfer points, such as loading docks, handoffs between vehicles, and storage zones, are risk points. As one source notes, even small temperature spikes can significantly reduce product shelf life without overt signs of damage.

Regulatory compliance and traceability—Cold chain operations are subject to strict regulations, including those regarding food safety, pharma, import/export documentation, audit trails, temperature logging, and certifications. Paper-based or siloed digital systems often fail to provide the level of visibility and traceability required for these demanding requirements.

High operational costs and infrastructure complexity – Meeting the demands of cold chain logistics, such as refrigerated storage, specialized transport, energy consumption, specialized labor, and infrastructure investments, is expensive. Many 3PLs struggle with high maintenance costs on aging equipment, a lack of energy efficiency, and increasing fuel costs.

Supply chain visibility and data silos – Multiple warehouse, transport, partner integration, and quality monitoring systems often lead to fragmented data. If real-time visibility across the entire transportation chain is weak, issues are uncovered too late after spoilage, failed deliveries, or customer complaints have already occurred.

Demand volatility and capacity planning—Consumer demand for fresh/frozen goods can fluctuate sharply. Peak seasons, weather, regulatory delays, or transportation disruptions can disrupt schedules and spoil goods, so 3PLs must plan capacity carefully.

Environmental and sustainability pressures—Regulators, customers, and investors are increasingly pressuring companies to reduce emissions, improve energy efficiency, use greener refrigerants, and minimize waste. These require technological and process investments.

Solutions via Dynamics 365 Business Central + Boltrics 3PL Dynamics

Boltrics 3PL Dynamics is a specialized 3PL and warehouse management suite built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, helping companies address many of the challenges outlined above in a unified, scalable manner. Below are how each team (3PL management, financial, and IT) benefits, and the solution components.

What 3PL management teams gain

Integrated temperature and condition monitoring – Boltrics supports cold chain-specific operations. When combined with Business Central’s ability to handle transactions, warehousing, transportation, and inventory, companies can integrate temperature and humidity sensor data, alerts, and control thresholds into the workflow. For example, if a temperature drift is detected during storage or transit, the 3PL staff can receive alerts and act immediately rather than discovering spoilage after the fact.

Improved warehouse workflow and traceability – Boltrics 3PL Dynamics is built for warehouses and supports managing zones, slots, picking, FEFO (First Expired, First Out), batch tracking, expiry dates, etc. These features are crucial for maintaining the integrity of cold chain goods. When integrated with Business Central, managers can see real-time stock status, batch movements, and expiry risk across all warehouses and transport stages.

Capacity and resource planning – Business Central holds financial, inventory, and operational data. When combined with Boltrics’ visibility into warehousing and transportation tasks, scheduling and capacity planning become more predictable, allowing peak volumes and seasonal fluctuations to be modeled more accurately. Additionally, staffing, energy usage, and transportation assets can be allocated optimally.

Financial teams: Control, costing, compliance

Accurate costing and margin visibility – Cold chain operations carry premium costs, including energy, maintenance, special transport, and spoilage. Business Central provides centralized financial accounting. When provided with detailed data from Boltrics, such as stock losses, temperature failures, overtime, and transport cost variances, finance teams can allocate costs precisely to specific service lines, customers, or geographical areas. Understanding true margins is essential for effective pricing, contracting, and investing.

Regulatory, audit, and reporting compliance – With automatic recording of temperature, batch, expiry, movement, and handling events, the combined solution helps generate the reports required by auditors and regulators. Business Central supports traceability and multi-company, multi-entity finance. Boltrics adds the operational data, reducing manual errors, lowering compliance risk, and supporting more frequent or ad-hoc audits.

Reduced waste and better inventory turns – Inventory losses decrease when spoilage is minimized via real-time monitoring and stock is rotated properly (FEFO). Predictive insights from Boltrics plus operational data allow finance teams to budget and provision more accurately, lowering excess inventory carrying cost.

IT teams: Integration, security, scalability

Unified platform and technology stack – Since Boltrics 3PL Dynamics is built on Business Central, many aspects of integration are native or simpler. Data flows between warehousing, inventory, transport, and accounting and finance are less likely to require complex ETL (extract-transform-load) pipelines or fragile custom integrations, which helps reduce development, maintenance, and points of failure.

Security, compliance, and access control – Business Central provides enterprise-grade security features, including role-based access, encryption, multi-factor authentication, and audit logs. IT teams benefit from standardized governance. Boltrics conforms to these and aligns updates to Business Central’s release waves to ensure compatibility.

Scalability and maintainability – The combined solution supports scaling to multiple warehouses, multiple customers, and international operations (multi-company, multi-currency) since Business Central is built for global use. Boltrics ensures that its 3PL tools are updated and released to stay aligned with Business Central updates, minimizing the risk of version drift or incompatibility.

Putting it all together: A sample use case

Here’s a hypothetical scenario illustrating how all three teams (3PL Management, Finance, and IT) benefit:

A 3PL cold chain provider handles frozen food for retail chains. They’ve struggled with spoilage during peak summer months, difficulty proving compliance during audits, unpredictable operating costs (especially energy and transport), and scattered data across their warehouse management and finance systems.

By adopting Boltrics 3PL Dynamics alongside Business Central:

• Temperature sensors in their storage zones and transport assets are tied into Boltrics workflows. Alerts are generated when thresholds are breached, and corrective actions are logged immediately.
• Their warehouse staff use batch/expiry tracking to enforce FEFO, and slow-moving or soon-to-expire stock is highlighted.
• On the finance side, cost allocations include temperature loss, energy usage, transport, shrinkage, and labor. Business Central reporting displays margins by customer, product type, and route.
• The IT team ensures the system is secure, data flows are reliable, and integration points are well-documented. They minimize risk by following Business Central release waves; Boltrics provides updates aligned with Business Central releases to avoid downtime and incompatibilities.

Final thoughts

Cold chain logistics are high stakes. Management, financial, and IT teams all carry responsibilities, which include maintaining product quality and safety, controlling costs, ensuring compliance and accountability, and operating scalable and reliable systems.

When a provider brings Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Boltrics 3PL Dynamics together, they gain a unified, end-to-end platform that links operations (warehouse, transportation, and stock handling) with finance and compliance, providing visibility, alerts, and traceability.

Contact ArcherPoint by Cherry Bekaert to learn more about optimizing your 3PL solutions for cold chain logistics.

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