15 Ways RTLS Disrupts Manufacturing Processes—for the Better
Have you ever thought about what work was like before the telephone was a thing? Most of today’s workforce will remember days before broadband internet. It’s likely that future generations will wonder about a time before work-from-home was feasible.
The point is that technologies change how we work, and many tech solutions are designed specifically to improve our work outputs. This blog post delves into 15 ways real-time location systems (RTLS) are disrupting manufacturing for the better.
Additional Reading: 25 Ways Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) Solve Real-World Problems.
One thing to note upfront: Although the points below describe RTLS generally—as if everything is being tracked already—manufacturers can actually choose bits and pieces of nearly every point addressed and can mix and match to what makes the most sense for their organizations.
Work in Progress Tracking
Work in progress (WIP) tracking is primarily concerned with how items in production move from one step to another. As such, motion is a common denominator for this kind of process management, making insights on real-time location useful at nearly every juncture.
1. Delivering time and motion data
Manufacturing almost always involves many things moving simultaneously. Whether it’s a batch of parts advancing on the same conveyor belt, a stack of work orders progressing from one station to another, or a worker moving from task to task, the factory is a happening place. One danger is that parts, pieces, or even people can end up in places they shouldn’t. Also, moving from one place to another rarely happens in the most direct, efficient route possible. Thanks to RTLS, manufacturers and other organizations can study actual data on how everything moves.
The patterns behind all these moving parts are invaluable. Real-time location data can illustrate where space can be optimized better. Motion histories can reveal anomalies from normal processes. Timing data can quantify how long each production phase takes without requiring workers to manually account for it. There are dozens of useful ways to leverage a real understanding of time and motion. Today’s factory management “Taylorism” has come a long way since the late 19th century.
2. Providing early warning signs
Real-time location data can’t identify every possible problem, but asset visibility makes many issues plain right away. For a few examples, consider a pallet of materials inadvertently left at one end of the factory when it’s needed at the other, items on a conveyor belt slowing to half their normal speed, or a perishable item being picked to ship ahead of items nearing the end of their shelf life. The right data can address each of these problems. One real strength of having RTLS in place is the ability to see early warning indicators before they become roadblocks.
3. Generating location-based updates
On the positive side of that same coin, location data can also provide affirmative updates—marking an item’s progression from assembly to quality control, for instance, or triggering status updates as manufactured parts advance from one step to another. Location-based WIP tracking delivers a granular, in-the-moment picture of how far—and in what order—key processes have gone. It also helps reduce the number of manual scans and processes required, as discussed next.
This can be especially valuable for processes involving a steady flow of materials or tools, similar to most automotive manufacturing processes today.
4. Eliminating manual scanning
Scanning solutions like barcodes are ubiquitous in manufacturing. Even in cases where the manufactured part can’t house a barcode itself, factories often institute processes for moving work orders (with individual barcodes) through each stage of manufacturing in time with the item being made.
Scanning is nonetheless a manual process; it’s cumbersome and prone to human error. RTLS can reduce errors with automated, real-time updates—as opposed to updates only at the point of the scan. This makes processes more accurate, efficient, and agile.
Case in point, imagine a 30-step manufacturing process that uses manual scans to log each step. Missing a scanning point could call the entire routine into question if workers don’t catch the error right away. In fact, many manufacturers simply scrap a product if the process missed a key step, since dissembling the item or running a custom operation to fix the mistake is so unwieldy and expensive. By mapping out all the key location points between each scan, it’s possible to actually eliminate the scan itself and proceed with much more confidence in the manufacturing task.
5. Identifying bottlenecks and breaking points
Bottlenecks, chokepoints, or other hurdles between the beginning and the end of a project cost trillions of dollars every year. The good news is many process anomalies are simple and easy to spot proactively, given tools to deliver timing and location data.
As an example, tracking even zone-level location data can show if an item required 10 minutes in the first few stations and 10 hours in the next. More precise location data or tracking histories can help illustrate exactly where and when each delay begins, so that any plans to address them are based on real data and not just a best guess.
Worker Safety
RTLS isn’t the panacea for every risk factory workers face. Dozens of technologies feed into the safety and wellbeing of employees on the job. RTLS fits well into this landscape, however, providing a few unique benefits that are difficult to attain without real-time, dependable location data.
6. Contact tracing
Perhaps little needs to be mentioned here, given how widely this idea has been debated in recent months. Suffice it to say that many contact-tracing solutions are now in-use in working environments—including factories—and the main goal is to help identify who had contact with whom when infection is a concern. Using RTLS, rather than just proximity data, adds a few advantages in this regard, since real-time location data shows not only when, where, and for how long anyone interacted, but also where individuals spent time between those interactions.
7. Collision Prevention
Although this is one of the more obvious issues for worker safety, companies continue to come up with new collision prevention measures nearly every year. Why? Unfortunately, because harmful collisions keep happening. In fact, worker injuries cost factories upward of $7B per annum in the U.S. alone, with collisions among the leading offenders.
Existing safety measures in this regard include bright signage, audible alerts while vehicles or people move, indoor traffic lights, deployable safety buffers, extensive training, and protective gear for individual workers. What RTLS contributes is in-the-moment data to inform the use of any additional measures.
Here are a few examples: Having a vehicle and a worker approach each other down intersecting hallways could cause lights to come on, or an audio warning to appear, or a haptic alert to trigger on a worker’s person. Rather than having bright, distracting signals flaring constantly, location data can inform other tools at the appropriate time and leave work undisrupted otherwise.
8. Identifying Congested or Dangerous Areas
A big part of collision prevention is identifying the locations where accidents are likely to happen. Location histories can be heatmaps for clogged or hazardous areas. Having a point-by-point trail of where forklifts, pallets, unmanned vehicles, or workers move will immediately show where they share space and how regularly intersection is most likely to occur. This data can then provide insights for whether shifts need to be adjusted, work processes need to change, or even whether a workspace layout itself needs a change to bolster worker safety.
9. Virtual security zoning
Gone are the days when walls, chain-linked paddocks, or locked doors are the only ways to safeguard sensitive areas. Manufacturers can now implement virtual security zoning by simply a) defining the perimeter of a restricted zone and b) choosing who has what access. While virtual perimeters don’t stop contractors or long-term workers from wandering into an area where they shouldn’t be, they can report perimeter violations immediately and automatically, both to workers and to a supervisor.
RTLS makes it possible to delineate restricted zones as items move in real time. An indoor vehicle, for example, could be surrounded by a safety zone that moves with it. Virtual zoning can also eliminate the need for expensive door readers, replacing badge scanning with real-time location data. Furthermore, using location data is generally less personally intrusive than camera or vision-based systems, and RTLS tracking zones can easily be confined to specific workspaces only.
Inventory Management
Keeping track of inventories is a technical challenge for every industry—not just manufacturing. However, smart inventories can be especially important in settings where unplanned downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each hour, often due to just one or two missing objects.
10. Automating inventory reports
One of the most valuable benefits RTLS provides is its ability to automate inventory reporting. Rather than planning times to shut down operations and check for key tools, hunt for missing items, or individually re-scan materials that never moved in the first place, inventory can become an autonomous, always-current process.
This means that inventory managers can also create customized alerts for when an item leaves its allowed area, when a quantity is low, or when another performance parameter is reached.
11. Cutting paperwork from checkout processes
Checking tools or rental equipment in and out can be a massive headache for environments like factories, where thousands of pieces move every day. Another key way to reduce workloads, prevent theft or loss, and enhance performance is to automate these processes with RTLS.
For instance, by knowing where a worker is and where a key item belongs, it’s possible to simplify the checkout process to one step: picking up the needed item. WISER Systems helped one aerospace plant do just this. by pairing ultra-wideband (UWB) RTLS with their existing processes. The resulting solution eliminated more than a hundred hours of tool inventory each month.
12. Providing quick search for missing items
Chances are good that you’ve reached for something only to realize it wasn’t where you thought it should be. Whether it’s car keys, a phone, a wallet, or a work order, the problem is the same. It means you have to go looking, retracing your steps, or asking who else might have moved it. For mission-critical items, it might delay vital steps and add waste or danger for every minute lost on the search.
RTLS mitigates this risk by allowing an immediate virtual search for tagged items based on name, ID, category, or virtually any other characteristic. Instead of hitting the factory floor to start the search, factory workers can simply enter the identifying information on a mobile device and see a current picture of where that elusive asset is now. Some wayfinding RTLS solutions even provide a trail from a worker’s current location to the desired item.
13. Generating usage data
Lost items aren’t likely to be used. Unfortunately, items in their normal place often go unused as well. Pallets, safety gear, hand tools, bins, welding equipment, and even high-dollar items like forklifts often sit idle for months, perhaps because they’re lost or perhaps because they’re simply not needed. Real-time location data provides a simple way to study the usage of and demand for vehicles, machines, tools, or even individual work stations.
Gathering data on space and item usage is a powerful way to maximize square footage, reduce excessive purchases, and stay lean. It also helps identify backlogs from equipment shortages or other areas where more item purchases could actually translate into greater productivity and increased revenues.
Other Possibilities
14. Augmenting other technologies
RTLS doesn’t create a zero-sum game for other technologies. In nearly every case, manufacturers can still use their barcodes or passive RFID, their existing safety systems, their training programs, personal equipment, or any other kind of ‘technology’ while also using real-time, highly precise location technologies.
As an example, WISER helped one manufacturer pair the WISER Locator—an RTLS solution—with a conventional barcode system. This addressed common problems of missing items while building on what already worked. The long and short is that RTLS adds real-time visibility and other capabilities, typically working in tandem with the tools manufacturers already have in place.
15. Augmenting existing work processes
It’s also worth noting that RTLS isn’t here to erase the finely-honed ways manufacturers already do things. Because real-time location data reports where things are, rather than mandating where they should be, it can be used to inform, study, assess, or update nearly any work effort involving location, from assembly line processes to quality control to loading and delivery.
In Sum
Manufacturing will probably keep changing as long as people want new things to be made. As such, the 15 points above are just starting positions.
Now and in the future, RTLS will save time for workers, help prevent unplanned downtime, and let manufacturers focus on improving their output—the things their workers really need to do.
Post by Stephen Taylor, Director of Communications at WISER Systems, Inc.