
Ultimate Guide to Real-time Location Systems
Real-time Location Systems have been around for a while. But it is important to understand what they are and how they work before examining their future.
Pathfindr’s Real-Time Asset Intelligence platform allows our customers to shine a light on their processes and practices to facilitate improved efficacy and ultimately much better outcomes.
Understand how frequently your assets are being used. How much use are you getting from tools and machinery? When were they last used? Do your tools need to be serviced? Our in facility asset tracking solutions helps answer these and many other questions.
Track your assets in real-time anywhere across your facility, both indoors and outdoors. Configure location alerts and notifications and view the history of all your assets.
Understand how frequently your assets are being used. How much use are you getting from tools and machinery? When were they last used? Do your tools need to be serviced?
Obtain accurate, minute-by-minute temperature, humidity and other environmental information about your assets and facility.
Gain valuable Lean insights to optimise processes and improve efficiency. Are processes taking longer than they should? Identify bottlenecks and improve performance.
Get minute-by-minute location, environmental, usage and process data to provide actionable intelligence.
Does looking for orders, parts, fixtures or tooling slow you down? We can greatly reduce your time-to-find.
Get a single view of your WIP and assets both indoor and outdoor, across all your business units.
Minimise shared asset waiting waste. We help to optimise your usage and reduce duplicate assets.
Stop assets going missing and reduce scrappage due to lost paperwork. Minimise insurance claims and premiums.
Built-in support for export-controlled data. Easy to manage export certificates for assets and users.
Our average time to find assets has been reduced by 80%.
A Facility Tracking Customer in Manufacturing
Indoor Asset Tracking Frequently Asked Questions
What Is Indoor Asset Tracking?
Indoor assets tracking is simply a system or solution that
allows you to track an asset’s location, movement and more within an indoor
space such as a warehouse, manufacturing plant or factory.
Asset tracking is not just limited to location however, you
can also look at the asset’s movement, runtime (if it is on or off),
temperature and environmental data (is the item being subjected to
environmental pressures).
What Is an Asset?
An asset can be anything that you may want to track in the workspace. This could be tools, parts, composites, equipment (forklifts, pallets, pump trucks) or even the product themselves. A growing number of companies in sectors such as aerospace and automotive are turning to asset tracking to give them greater visibility into their Work In Progress (WIP) process to see where holdups and bottlenecks are occurring in their manufacturing process.
What Method of Tracking Is Best for My Assets?
This will be determined by exactly what you are looking to track with your assets. As mentioned above, asset tracking is not just about location, so if you are looking to track the run time data on your stationary machines, then you wouldn’t need to know it’s location data through GPS or LoRa, but rather how often it is being used through a tracking tag’s accelerometer and local connectivity to a tag base unit.
How Do You Track an Asset in A Building?
Indoor asset tracking can be achieved using several types of technology including Ultra-Wide Band (UWB), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS satellite tracking. The choice of technology for tracking depends on the specific tracking needs, as well as the desired level of accuracy and frequency. Below is a brief overview on what each technology can do.
What is Tool Tracking?
Tool tracking has become more commonplace in factories, manufacturing plants and indoor locations across the UK.
Tool tracking allows you to not only locate your tool within the indoor location, but also see the environmental and run-time activity using Pathfindr’s asset tracking and intelligence platform. A simple to use, web interface allows you to see your tools real-time data, even if your factory is the other side of the world.
Asset tracking and management systems can be used to create alerts for tools based on varying factors, such as run-time, location, temperature, or dew point. All of which are fully customisable in the online portal.
The use of high-value shared equipment can be uncoordinated, causing increased costs and errors from inefficient or incorrect use of equipment.
Pathfindr’s tool management module ensures important maintenance and calibration schedules are met and tools are staged and used correctly, improving quality and use.
Easily create alerts for tools or equipment that are due (or overdue) maintenance or calibration but still in use.
We work with several aerospace and aviation manufactures who utilise Pathfindr’s Tool management systems to help protect against Foreign Object Damage (FOD) by ensuring tools are not left in a planes body while work is ongoing. Not only can this save businesses time and money by knowing where high-value tools are located should the go missing, but also ensuring that upon work being finished, no tool is accidentally left in in bodywork or fuselage, thus reducing delays and expensive grounding of planes to remove the foreign object.
What is Work In Progress (WIP) Asset Tracking
Indoor asset tracking is not just about the location of equipment and tools but can also allow you to see the status of your WIP (work in progress) line. By analysing your WIP, you have greater visibility on bottlenecks, holdups, and areas of that are not running as efficient as you want in real-time. By placing an asset tag onto the product at the start of the assembly line, manufacturers can see which areas of the process are slowing down or even stopping production.
Indoor tracking has numerous real-world benefits to businesses across all sectors and is becoming increasingly important for businesses looking to get real-time data and insights into their assets. Pathfindr can assist you with all your indoor tracking asset needs – click here for more information or to speak with us about indoor asset tracking.
Real-time Location Systems have been around for a while. But it is important to understand what they are and how they work before examining their future.
Safe Distancing has reached renewed prominence with COVID and the need to maintain distance to inhibit its spread. But there are many other applications of this technology which are explored in the post.
If there is one thing the COVID-19 crisis has taught us it’s that remaining agile as a business is critical. With brewers producing hand sanitiser and defence contractors ventilators, all are doing their bit.
Pathfindr’s award-winning Industrial IoT solutions provide customers with real-time insights into their assets and processes. From indoor and outdoor asset tracking and asset monitoring, our consultative approach has helped transform businesses around the world.