Recent additions to Zebra Technologies’ extensive white paper library include a report prepared by the research firm of Frost & Sullivan entitled Seeking Sustainable Growth: Understanding the value real-time visibility technology brings to business and people. While the 12-page report covers a range of RTLS-related topics, including current and future scopes of the global RTLS market, the sections I found most interesting were those titled Key Business Challenges that RTLS Addresses and Highlights of Zebra RTLS Best Practices.
Business Challenges Addressed by RTLS
Frost & Sullivan identifies key RTLS-related business challenges faced by six industries:
- Manufacturing: Production time is lost due to repeated searches for appropriate tools and materials, tools and materials are lost to theft, tracking of work in progress is conducted manually or with error-prone barcodes, and the safety of workers is challenged.
- Automotive: Similar inefficiencies result from lack of location information for tools, raw materials and other assets, and are exacerbated by the challenges inherent to locating millions of parts and thousands of vehicles.
- Aerospace: Work in progress and assembly lines are even more complicated, with locating tools, components and materials an even greater challenge.
- Healthcare: Treatments are delayed due to inefficiencies in tracking medical personnel and equipment. Patient safety – particularly as it relates to patient identification – is a constant concern.
- Livestock: It’s hard to imagine a greater challenge than tracking the location of and monitoring the health and fertility condition of individual members of constantly moving livestock herds.
- Maritime: Modern maritime freight management involves handling thousands of containers as they move to and from hundreds of ships, while maintaining the security of those thousands of containers, all complicated by the legal requirements of accounting to the multiple jurisdictions through which the freight passes.
Zebra RTLS technologies address these challenges by:
- Drastically reducing time required for locating tools, materials and other assets by delivering affordable real-time visibility to each and every item.
- Optimizing the flow of work in progress by delivering real-time status of all critical elements of that work.
- Immediately identifying the location of key medical personnel when seconds saved mean lives saved.
- Increasing patient safety by delivering positive identification of patients and tracking their real-time movements within care facilities.
- Yielding unparalleled efficiency to livestock operations by locating and monitoring each individual animal in real time.
- Enabling real-time visibility of all ships and cargo in port.
Highlights of Zebra RTLS Best Practices
Frost & Sullivan describes Zebra’s best RTLS practices in the context of an actual case study – that of retail concern, VisibleBrands. The challenges faced by VisibleBrands include the fragmentation of the traditional retail marketing channels, requiring increasing focus on in-store marketing – in other words, at the moment the purchase decision is made.
VisibleBrands embeds a Dart tag in every shopping cart and basket, converting each into a connected mobile device individually identifiable on its networks. Location data is compiled and processed in real time to create a consumer-behavior matrix. Critical data is gathered from back-end to point-of-sale, yielding valuable intelligence “on the base line lift in dollars and units.”
The result? The Dart UWB RTLS solution allows VisibleBrands’ retailers to identify and analyze shopper behavior,optimize store layouts, and design effective “impression-based digital coupon campaigns.”