Cold-Chain Incident Dispatch with n8n: Twilio, Sheets & Gmail

Cold-Chain Alert Dispatch Made Automatic with n8n (Twilio, Google Sheets & Gmail)

This n8n workflow receives cold-chain temperature alerts via webhook, checks your client SLA rules in Google Sheets, determines severity, and automatically dispatches an on-call technician using Twilio SMS—while tracking acknowledgements, escalations, and daily SLA reporting.

What this workflow does

• Ingests alerts via webhook: Accepts a POST webhook alert, normalizes the payload, and rejects invalid requests with a 400 response.
• Validates client contracts: Looks up the client ID in Google Sheets and returns 404 for unknown client IDs.
• Detects likely defrost-cycle spikes: If the reading resembles a defrost-cycle spike, logs the observation to Google Sheets and returns 202 without dispatching.
• Calculates severity + SLA deadlines: Computes severity and SLA deadlines, checks for existing open tickets for the same client/equipment, and suppresses duplicates using an audit log (200 response).
• Dispatches certified technicians: Selects an available certified technician from a Sheets roster. Creates either an UNASSIGNED ticket (notifying the on-call lead by Twilio SMS) or a DISPATCHED ticket (locking the technician as ON_JOB and notifying both technician and client via Twilio SMS).
• Handles technician status updates: Receives accept/decline/on-site/resolved updates via callback webhook, updates Google Sheets state, logs the event, and returns an HTML confirmation.
• Automates SLA monitoring & escalation: Runs every 5 minutes to evaluate SLA progress, reassign/escalate as needed, sends Twilio escalation SMS/voice calls, and updates ticket/technician status in Google Sheets.

Use cases

• Auto-dispatch technicians when refrigerated equipment deviates from cold-chain temperature thresholds.
• Prevent duplicate incident creation for the same client/equipment through ticket suppression logic.
• Operational monitoring that escalates within SLA using Twilio notifications and Sheets-based audit trails.
• Centralized daily SLA reporting supported through Google Sheets with email capabilities via Gmail.

Technical details

• n8n nodes/integrations: if, set, code, gmail, filter, twilio
• Data store: Google Sheets (client SLA rules, technician roster, ticket/audit logs, SLA reporting)
• Messaging: Twilio SMS for technician/client and escalation, including voice calls for escalations
• Interfaces: Webhook POST ingestion + callback webhook for technician updates, with HTTP status handling (400/404/202/200)