Background
Managing and tracking Returnable Assets has become a critical aspect for modern businesses, especially in the manufacturing and logistics sectors. Companies need to track and locate assets that are reused in the operational cycle, such as pallets, containers and equipment, for several reasons:
- Operational efficiency: Returnable Assets, such as reusable containers, pallets, crates and equipment, are essential to optimising the flow of materials and products along the supply and production chain. A tracking system allows to manage them more efficiently, reducing downtime and ensuring they are always available when needed.
- Cost reduction: tracking these assets helps avoid loss or damage, reducing replacement costs. It also allows for more accurate management of asset lifecycles, ensuring they are reused to their full potential.
- Sustainability: using Returnable Assets is an environmentally friendly practice, as it reduces the need for disposable products. Tracking allows companies to ensure that these assets are actually reused, contributing to the sustainability of operations.
- Supply chain management: in modern logistics, asset management is essential to ensuring a smooth supply chain. Returnable Assets are used to transport raw materials and finished products; therefore, it is essential to know where they are at all times to optimise storage and shipping processes.
- Traceability and compliance: in some industries, asset traceability is a regulatory or contractual requirement. Monitoring the location and status of Returnable Assets helps you comply with these regulations and ensure proper logistics management.
- Technology and innovation: with the introduction of technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) and passive and active RFID tracking systems, you can obtain real-time data on the location and status of your assets. These technologies provide a level of precision and visibility that further improves asset management and planning.
Challenge
A customer operating in the large agricultural machinery manufacturing sector turned to BlueUp to develop a solution capable of accurately and continuously tracking pallets and metal containers (about 600 units) used for the handling of semi-finished and finished products. The company manages a complex production environment, distributed across multiple plants (even very distant from each other, some of which are organized with multiple buildings and outdoor storage areas) where the different phases of the production cycle are implemented. The company did not have an automatic system to track and locate pallets and containers distributed across the different plants. This caused a series of inefficiencies: personnel employed to search for assets, waiting times during the handling phase due to the lack of pallets or containers in adequate quantities with consequent delays and production stops, lack of adequate visibility of the production and logistics process. These inefficiencies had a significant impact on the company’s margins.
The company had already evaluated some technological solutions which however, for various reasons, were not adequate for the specific needs:
- GPS: the first solution hypothesized was to adopt GPS trackers with cellular connectivity applied to individual assets. Despite the benefits related to the absence of physical infrastructure within the plants and visibility during transport phases, this solution was discarded for two reasons: 1) difficulty in providing a sufficiently accurate location of the assets at indoor level in the different plants; 2) high costs, related to the high cost of the trackers and the recursive costs of the system (data traffic, SaaS platform, …)
- UHF RFID: the company also considered the possibility of using RFID tags to identify and track its assets. However, this option, despite presenting a very low tag cost per asset, was discarded as it would have required dedicated RFID portals for entry and exit, high infrastructure costs at the various plants and no ability to locate within the various plants.
Solution
After an in-depth analysis of the requirements and constraints presented by the customer, BlueUp decided to tackle the challenge by proposing a solution based on the MeshCube platform, which uses Wirepas Mesh 2.4GHz technology. The main strength of the solution proposed by BlueUp was the ability to provide position information for the various assets (pallets, containers) within the areas of individual plants (both indoor and outdoor) without requiring an expensive wired infrastructure. In fact, due to the large size of the areas to be covered (a total of approximately 60,000 m2 indoors and outdoors distributed across the various plants), the presence of external areas without electrical or network infrastructure, and the complexity of the production layout, the cost of installing wired antennas would have been excessive.
Furthermore, Wirepas technology proved to be particularly suitable as the customer did not need continuous real-time tracking (the storage times of the different types of assets are long, in the order of hours or days, if not weeks in some cases).
The solution involved the installation of a total of 340 battery-powered anchors (Brick Wirepas), divided into the different plants. Thanks to Wirepas technology, which allows the creation of self-organizing and self-healing mesh networks, without the need for manual configuration, it was therefore possible to cover the plants with a location infrastructure without any wiring. In each plant a mesh gateway was installed (more than one in the case of larger and more complex plants) with Ethernet connectivity (TinyGateway PoE Wirepas).
Each asset (for a total of about 600 pallets and containers) was equipped with a Wirepas tag. The Forte+ Wirepas model was adopted for its characteristics of mechanical robustness, resistance to rain and simplicity in the battery change procedure.
Thanks to the simplicity of the procedure, the anchor and tag fixing and installation activities were managed autonomously by the company’s internal staff (without the need for external service companies), under the technical supervision of BlueUp staff who provided the guidelines and indications on the position of the anchors (defined after an experimental phase that anticipated the entire project, and involved an initial pilot plant and a limited number of containers). The customer estimated that the total time required for the installation of all the devices (anchors, tags, gateways) was just 10 man/days.
Each tag was configured to transmit position data every few minutes. To optimize battery consumption, the tags enter a sleep state when they are not moved for more than 12 hours, increasing the positioning interval to 6 hours. Position data is forwarded, through the mesh network, to the gateway, which sends it to the MeshCube platform (given the distribution of the infrastructure across several factories, the software was installed on a server in the customer’s cloud). During the testing phase and in the initial period of system introduction, the customer directly used the MeshCube web interface to monitor the system status. Subsequently, the customer developed a dedicated application internally that provides the necessary summary information and statistical data on the use of the various assets, integrating the information provided by MeshCube through the HTTP API.
Results
The solution provided by BlueUp, based on a mesh infrastructure and the MeshCube platform, has proven to be easy to install, immediate to use and rapidly scalable. The wireless infrastructure has reduced installation costs and simplified expansion into new areas without structural interventions (an area of a plant, not initially covered by the system due to work in progress, was integrated by simply adding 40 battery anchors in an intervention that lasted less than half a day).
The customer was able to immediately benefit from tangible advantages thanks to access to relevant information: number of containers available and in use in each plant, location of containers, containers in transit, statistics on usage data, …
The automation of asset tracking and visibility of location have significantly reduced search times, improved logistics processes, increased production efficiency. Thanks to these benefits, the customer estimated a return on investment of less than 18 months, net of economic and tax benefits for the implementation of the project.
Further developments to the system are being analyzed, including the possibility of locating pallets and containers during the transport phase. By exploiting the hybrid operating mode of BlueUp’s Wirepas tags, which can also work as BLE tags, it is possible to locate them when they are on the customer’s means of transport, equipping the vehicles with GPS trackers with BLE scanning functionality.
Conclusions
BlueUp has developed, for a customer active in the sector of the production of large agricultural machinery, a solution based on Wirepas technology and on the MeshCube platform, for the localization and tracking of pallets and metal containers used for the handling of semi-finished and finished products. The solution is based on a localization infrastructure installed in multiple production sites consisting of mesh networks of powered and battery-powered devices (anchors), industrial tags installed on individual assets and the MeshCube middleware platform. The project has demonstrated how Wirepas technology, thanks to its wireless communication and localization architecture, represents an advanced and efficient solution for the management of Returnable Assets (reusable goods), especially in cases where localization on large surfaces is required. The full compliance of the solution with the functional and economic requirements of the customer, the simple integration with company information systems and its easy scalability have made this implementation a concrete example of how technological innovation can address and solve operational challenges in complex production environments. This case also highlights how an adequate analysis of the customer’s requirements, a study of the available technological options, the identification and customization of the solution best suited to the project’s needs, are all necessary steps to achieve the expected result and bring significant improvements to the user company in terms of efficiency, cost reduction and sustainability.