Logistics is all about efficiency. Every day, a large number of pallets and packages arrive in warehouses and others have to leave at the same time. In between are the goods that are being stored, sometimes for a short time, sometimes for a long time. Keeping track of all this is not easy and costs time and money. A tracking system helps to know where a package or a pallet is at any time. What’s more, it even makes it possible to keep track of when the goods go in or out of the warehouse. Real-time asset tracking provides the perfect basis for analysis and numbers-driven process optimization.

Adopting digital solutions always means upheaval within an organization. Existing processes are analyzed and questioned, problems are uncovered, and responsibilities may be redistributed. All of this can lead to dissatisfaction among employees, whose commitment is needed more than ever, especially when implementing new systems. Successful digitization projects show that the more employees are involved in the digitization process and the more they can contribute their ideas and experiences as users, the smoother the implementation of the digital process will be.

Let’s take an example: In a warehouse, pallets and packages come in and out every day. However, some of them stay in the warehouse longer than planned due to other delays, such as payment, onward transportation, etc. In order to keep track of all the goods in the warehouse, a kind of inventory has to be taken regularly.

The inventory could look like this in a analog way: Pallets need to be searched and found, then picked off the shelf with a forklift. Another worker scans the delivery note on the pallet, and the data from the scan is manually entered into the ERP system. The whole process is time consuming. We know from various projects that this effort can easily add up to 900 hours/year. This inventory process is even more inefficient for pallets or packages that remain in the warehouse for an extended period of time. The information about when they arrived in the warehouse must be recorded manually on a recurring basis in order to bill customers for additional storage costs. That’s because each pallet occupies physical space that is not available to other shipments. The frequent movement of pallets also […]

Indoor positioning of persons and / or production equipment or other moving assets is developing into a key competence in production companies and industry. The exact location of assets in a building enables the optimization of internal logistic processes as well as the staff management in numerous industries and can therefore be a valuable tool for increasing efficiency while reducing costs. Favendo specializes in indoor tracking and the determination of indoor asset positions.Discover 5 indoor location technologies in brief:

Indoor Location technologies and granularity

Depending on the required accuracy (granularity) of the positioning, there are solutions with different positioning methods, which can also be based on different technologies. Each has different advantages and disadvantages.

Although WLAN is available in most buildings, it is often not the first choice of technology for an indoor positioning system due to low accuracy and high susceptibility to signal interference. While GPS signals don’t penetrate buildings, they are ideal for outdoor locations. RFID is also often mentioned in the context of indoor positioning systems, and it is true that RFID systems are inexpensive, but since they can only determine a static position, they are not well suited for indoor location tracking.

Bluetooth Low Energy is one of today’s standard technologies for indoor location

Bluetooth Low Energy and Beacons have proven to be the ideal technology for indoor positioning. The location technology is affordable, reliable and offers a satisfactory accuracy of 3-5 meters to locate people or objects in indoors. In addition, advanced Angle of Arrival (AoA) positioning methods based on Bluetooth positioning can achieve sub-meter accuracy similar to systems based on ultra wideband technology (UWB). Since the price of a system, in addition to the granularity of the positioning, plays a major role in the decision for a particular technology, and UWB is by far the most expensive technology, BLE now also has major advantages over UWB.

Indoor positioning system – how does it work?

Indoor positioning is based on the same transmitter-receiver principle as the well-known […]