10+3 Things To Consider When Choosing the Perfect Industrial Real-Time Location System

The indoor location market is still a fresh one and is quickly growing with multiple vendors covering various verticals, just as the clients’ ideas comes in. Does your chosen RTLS vendor have a proven record in your industry? In fact, this question turns to be a touchstone if your facility has harsh conditions:

• Are the tags and anchors water and dust resistant, ideally at least IP65?
• Can the hardware survive in various temperatures, e.g. from -20 °C to 60 °C?
• Is the tag resistant to industrial environment, e.g. tags might end up mounted at coils that are rotating at high speeds?

As with any other project, you might start just in one hall only tracking your seven forklifts to monitor their movement and improve their OEE. Soon, you would also like to track another two halls and add personnel and tugger tracking for safety reasons. The RTLS you are choosing now should be able to cover the needs of tomorrow – being easily expandable to other halls and able to cover thousands of square meters and track thousands of objects. A typical Sewio RTLS installation in automotive covers 70,000 m² and 2,000 tracked objects.

An open API to connect RTLS with your ERP or WMS is an indisputable must. The Achilles heel of APIs is when it has incomplete and outdated documentation covering a giant tree of classes and methods without any insight into what they are used for. Sewio’s complete, accurate and easy-to-digest API documentation supports the ease of its adoption, flattening its learning curve and helping developers by thinking through common use cases.

“75% of requirements for tracking included four and more use cases, including people” (Gartner). Building infrastructure based on RTLS has many advantages and the ability to re-use the same foundation again and again for new use cases, as the company’s digital-level maturity grows, is one of them. Does the RTLS vendor offer various tracking tags for each use case and allow you to easily add them to the current deployment?

When it comes to highly positive ROI and a short payback period, it is crucial to use only the amount of hardware really needed to cover the facility. In a real-life project, full 2D tracking is only needed for open spaces, while aisles, corridors and smaller rooms should be covered by the presence of 1D location mode. Obviously, narrow and long areas such as aisles can be better covered using antennas with a directional range, while wider areas are better covered by omni-directional ranges. The crucial question is whether your RTLS vendor offers different types of antennas (anchors) and allows location mode combination for a significant reduction in costs.

There are certain use cases where the tag has to be powered from the battery and not from the tracked object (e.g., the tag is powered by the forklift battery). Getting hundreds of tags to one place and charging them are time-consuming tasks, adding a significant portion to the total cost of ownership. For battery-powered tag tracking, it is, therefore, crucial that the tag’s power consumption has been optimized. A good tag’s battery life should be able to last for three years at two updates a second. Refer to this battery lifetime calculator when considering your RTLS vendor.

Most UWB vendors nowadays claim at least 30 cm (1 foot) accuracy, some go even lower promoting their “industry-unique” 5 cm (2 inches) accuracy. The catch here is the conditions in which the accuracy was tested – 5 cm accuracy is not an issue for the majority of vendors if done under laboratory conditions, but they will all quickly prove otherwise when moved to real-life harsh environments. Another question to be asked here is: “What was the confidence interval for the test that resulted in 5 cm accuracy?” Any number less than 99.5% makes the promise of 5 cm unfulfillable. Don’t be fooled by marketing talk that only the PoC (a proof-of-concept) at your site and its dynamic conditions can reveal if the vendor is ready to deliver on promise.

Well-established technological companies set their SLAs at 99.9%, which is recognized as a reliable uptime within the industry. It’s important to realize that even these “three nines” are equal to 8.77 hours of downtime in a single year, which might result in huge losses in mission-critical RTLS projects. Although the indoor tracking services market includes “old” brand names, it makes no difference – the solutions that any company is offering are still based on fresh technology. And the difference is sometimes enormous, as the RTLS project for Budweiser brewery showed – which was RTLS UWB at 99% uptime versus UHF RFID with 80% uptime.

The RTLS should provide you with the capability to monitor system health and have an automatic reporting and alerting mechanism. This not only prevents basic issues such as discharged batteries, but even other previously unexpected events. The alerting system removes any inconsistencies and the possibility of any problems being overlooked.

We have all been there. Without proper training, the project fails in its final stage – user adoption. In practice, every stage of a project influences its overall success and, therefore, should be supported by your RTLS vendor.  Here is what your vendor should provide:

• Global support and standard SLAs – ideally provided inhouse
• Free and easily accessible training and certification
• Both online and onsite consulting on request

To answer the question of whether the RTLS vendor supporting the system is a solid reputable company that will still be around in five years might not be as hard a task once it is split into multiple sub questions:

• Check out the history of the company – how long have they been on the market?
• Are some of their very first clients still using their RTLS?
• Do they have a clear vertical focus that is spread through multiple geographical markets?
• How big, reliable and mature is their partner network?

Even with great technology, the deployment of RTLS can go wrong. The advantages of having the deployment done by the vendor itself quickly vanish when stuck with a single company that fails in the installation phase. Going with a vendor with a wide partner network minimizes this risk by having the chance to re-select from a “competitive” ecosystem of integrators.

Does the RTLS vendor offer a transparent pricing model with both on-premise and as-a-service options so you can decide which approach fits your strategy? Can you upscale or downscale services with ease? Is the ROI and payback period a central part of your discussions with the vendor? These questions are all vital in helping you to evaluate their pricing model.