Background
A company in the automotive sector manufactures very large vehicles in high volumes. During the early stages of production, these semi-finished vehicles are indistinguishable from one another. Due to the nature of the production process, these items are temporarily stored—often without proper tracking—in areas that can be hundreds of meters away from where they are eventually needed.
Challenge
The semi-finished products are stored both indoors and outdoors, making the use of GPS technologies unfeasible. An initial attempt to track items by assigning the responsibility to forklift drivers failed due to the excessive manual effort required to collect accurate location data. When an item went untracked, it would effectively exit the production process and only reappear once it was eventually identified—sometimes weeks later. This led to cascading delays and made it difficult to monitor production. The search process often involved covering large areas by bicycle or forklift.
Solution
To overcome these challenges, our solution partner Bit Tonic implemented a Quuppa solution—equivalent to AccuRTLS—using AoA (Angle-of-Arrival) technology. This cutting-edge solution enables real-time tracking with location accuracy down to a few tens of centimeters in real-world industrial environments.
Each semi-finished product was fitted with a BlueUp Forte+ tag compatible with Quuppa’s infrastructure, enabling traditional indoor tracking via ceiling-mounted antennas. For the expansive outdoor areas—spanning several square kilometers—a fully autonomous drone system was developed. The drone is capable of autonomous take-off, landing, and navigation along predefined flight paths covering typical storage zones. Equipped with an AoA antenna, it can locate tagged items with one-meter accuracy. In adverse weather conditions or when flying is not possible, a similar tracking device mounted on forklifts—combined with GPS—was used to detect nearby assets during normal operations.
Results
The customer now has real-time visibility into the location of his semi-finished products, without requiring workers to perform manual tracking. This streamlined system has significantly improved production efficiency and reduced delays.