Overview
A product company came to us with a location problem. They needed to know where their assets were, indoors, while it was happening, and their existing tracking could not deliver it. / GPS was not an option inside, so the work started with UWB and the site constraints that came with it. Their NDA covers the details that make their system different, so this page describes the engagement without them.
Problem
Tracking was manual. People walked the floor to find equipment, wrote down where it had been, and the systems that needed locations never saw them.
The solution included:
- No position data available indoors
- Location data stranded outside their own software
- Tracking done by hand, after the fact
of time spent on non-value-added work
The cost was invisible in the accounts and obvious on the floor. Time spent searching is time not spent working, and nobody could prove where a pallet went last Tuesday.
Approach
One team handled the device layer and the software layer, so the anchors, the firmware and the positioning service were designed against the same set of requirements instead of being handed between vendors.
The solution included:
- Anchors and Tags to track coordinates over site floor
- Device Firmware for ranging, timing and device status
- Positioning service and dashboard taking ranging measurements in, live positions output, straight into the client's software.
Field trials ran on the client’s site against their acceptance criteria. The pilot held up, so the same team took it through to a deployment their engineers could run.
Outcome
Positions now arrive live, and they arrive somewhere useful. The same feed drives the client’s dashboard and their own systems, so nobody re-enters a location by hand.
We handed over documentation and training. Their team can operate the deployment, add tags and extend coverage without calling us.
The results were immediate and measurable:
faster aseet search time
+
inventory accuracy
The site runs on live position data instead of memory and paper. Both cards above carry the same sentence today, so give them different jobs.
Before vs After
What a live location feed changes
Manual Tracking
- Walking the floor to find equipment
- Positions recorded after the fact
- High error rates
- No way to watch assets move in real time
Automated Workflow
- 10 cm accurate tracking
- Live positions on a dashboard
- Geofencing and automated actions into the client's software
- 38% faster operations