Your cell phone can track you almost anywhere on the planet. Chances are that your vehicle can tell you exactly where it is located. How come your products or assets cannot do the same?
We are at a pretty good point with locating mobile computers both inside and outside of the four walls. Since they are basically ruggedized cell phones, that technology has been around for a while now. Zebra has Device Guardian to track their mobile computers. SOTI has device tracking capabilities for many brands of mobile computers in their MDM software.
But a converged, affordable system to track high value assets or products as they move around a facility or around the world is proving elusive. Passive RFID, Bluetooth Low Energy, cellular, Wi-Fi, Satellite, are all technologies out there that can be used for tracking and locating. But the solution sets that are out there are fragmented, expensive, and complicated to install.
The best, and most cost-effective solution that we have is to use, is passive RFID. It is a bread crumb approach to be sure. Telling you the last time a particular reader saw the item, what reader saw it, and what is the location of the reader. There are reader arrays like the ATR7000 from Zebra that will give you a somewhat better and more real-time location of items. But the range is limited, the ceiling height has to be good, and it falls prey to the typical passive RFID challenges.
Recently one of our customers noticed that when a big metal forklift drives past a group of passive tags, the RF energy from nearby readers is reflected to the tags, activates them, and gives a false reading on their location. Not to mention the limitations that liquid and metal put on the read range of passive tags.
We continue to search the industry for better solutions, but in the meantime, we can help you vet technologies to come up with the best way to track your products and assets, using what is available today.
So, if you are looking for a partner who can help you know where your products are at all times, visit us at www.emptechgroup.com to learn more.