Manufacturing
Network Location Data Tracks Inventory End-to-End
Locaid helps manufacturing organizations use indoor and outdoor location technologies to deploy total supply chain visibility systems. Total supply chain visibility lets you track raw materials, people, and products anywhere—anything from bar codes and RFID tracking within facilities, to LBS-enabled cellular data modules and satellite wireless solutions.
The potential of knowing where raw materials, resources, and products are in the supply chain at any given time enables you to streamline production and delivery, maintain leaner inventory, and lower your manufacturing costs.
Streamline Production and Delivery
According at an Aberdeen study, 50% of corporations with logistical asset operations have manual, labor intensive asset management processes and fully 75% of them know that their existing processes and systems fail to meet their operational maintenance requirements. That’s a lot of room for improvement.
Location information can help you to upgrade your systems so that you can dynamically adjust your plans depending on the location of your raw materials, products, equipment, and personnel. More knowledge about problems with the flow of resources through the supply chain in real time lets you adjust plans to minimize or eliminate the impact of changes. For example, you can alert a team about a shift in product manufacturing priorities if raw materials don’t arrive; give a team a heads up to unload a shipment as soon as it crosses a geo-fence; or initiate the import/export process the second a shipment arrives at a customs facility.
Maintain Leaner Inventory
Carefully tracking supplies lets you keep lower inventory on hand as you can be confident that inventory is where it needs to be. Knowing the location of your inventory tells you where it is, lets you know with confidence that it will be delivered on schedule, or helps you to implement a backup plan in when it isn’t.
Lower Costs
Businesses that implement fleet tracking experience a 14.8% reduction in average travel time per job, a 9.9% decrease in overtime pay, a 27.9% increase in operator compliance, and a 13.2% reduction in fuel costs. This adds up to $5,848 less spent per employee per year. How does it happen? Knowing where your trucks are all the time enables better routing decisions with fewer miles traveled. Monitoring driver behavior reduces unauthorized side trips, dangerous driving habits, unnecessary overtime, and fraud.
But these benefits are not limited to fleet tracking. Knowing where your products are at any given time is valuable for any business. A study of logistics companies determined that 25% of them lose or misplace more than 10% of their container fleet every year. It’s not just containers. Companies also misplace or lose to theft 12% of their IT assets each year. Installing a tracking device on an object decreases the instances of loss or theft and makes recovery much simpler. This technology has been in place for years in trucks and automobiles, but new technology makes it possible to track ever smaller objects cheaply.
