JAPP

The problem of locating assets is not new in manufacturing and there are many existing approaches to solving it. One approach relies purely on manual input from your employees – having them fill in a form with information about an asset (e.g. Work Order) location every time a Work Order arrives at a work center for processing.

As any system relying on manual input, this system is prone to human error, which can cause your company’s percent of on-time delivery to drop and increase labour costs, as employees go about looking for work orders that are not where they are supposed to be.

Another approach is to use the more commonly known technologies such as RFID and barcodes. Each of them, however, comes with its own benefits and limitations.

Along comes a new option that could be used for real-time locating: JAPP Real-Time Location System.

Asset Tracking (Work in Progress, Inventory, Moveable Equipment)
Radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and barcoding are very useful asset tracking technologies for various sectors such as healthcare, retail and manufacturing. They are not mutually exclusive, nor will one replace the other. However, they do have certain limitations when it comes to real-time asset location tracking.

While the tags for passive RFID are inexpensive, the readers are very expensive. And unless you’re using chokepoint RFID (which is what storefronts with large resonators use), you will need a lot of them for asset location tracking. In fact, you would need to position these readers every 3-4 meters for them to work as a real-time location system (RTLS). To work properly, passive RFID readers radiate a great deal of energy to pick up tag signals. Some organizations (such as hospitals) may be wary of this.

Barcode is widely used today, and greatly improve the efficiency of logistics, but there are still many shortcomings. Barcode is a visual communication technology, it means the scanner must “see” the barcode to read it. It only works when the scanner aims at the barcode. Another thing is
we cannot track the real-time location of items using barcodes as it doesn’t transmit any signal.

Compared to both technologies above, JAPP uses low-energy Bluetooth technology beacons for real-time asset tracking. So, what makes JAPP a good candidate for solving asset locating challenge?

Precise locating – With beacons you can get up to 5m accuracy both indoor and outdoor (depending on your budget and environment).
Cost-effectiveness – Beacons cost as much as active RFID tags, but does not need expensive readers.
No dedicated readers – By installing a mobile app on the phones of factory staff, you turn them into readers and save $1,000-8,000/reader that you’d normally need to spend if you go with active RFID.
Automatic scan & position update – Unlike passive RFID and barcodes, your workers don’t need to scan a tag manually to update an asset’s location. Their mobile devices do this automatically when they get in the proximity of the beacons attached to the vehicles.
Gradual implementation – You don’t have to cover the entire area you’d eventually like to deploy in. You can start in one area, or with one function, and create value before scaling. This “crawl, walk, run” approach with testing and deploying isn’t available with most Real-time Location Services (RTLS) solutions.