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IndustryWhere the work is, and how long it has been there.
Work in progress, tooling and people on a production floor — tracked continuously, so cycle time and dwell are measured rather than inferred from paperwork.
What is actually hard here.
Most plants know what left the line and what entered it. What happens in between is reconstructed afterwards from scan events, shift notes and a certain amount of memory. When a batch is late, the question “where did the time go?” is usually answered with an opinion.
Tooling is worse. Fixtures, jigs, gauges and torque tools wander. The time spent looking for them does not appear in any cost centre, and it is rarely small.
What it looks like on site.
The outputs worth having.
- Cycle time per station — measured from arrival and departure, not from when someone remembered to scan.
- Dwell and queue — where work sits waiting, and for how long, station by station.
- WIP location — which carrier holds which order, and where it is right now.
- Tool and fixture location — including the ones that are supposed to be in calibration.
- Zone occupancy and breach — a person inside a machine's exclusion zone, detected before anything moves.
- Route conformance — whether the part actually followed the process it was supposed to.
Why these, and not the others.
UWB leads because a station-level answer is not enough: the interesting delays happen between stations, in the aisles and buffers where nothing gets scanned.
RFID supports at each station, where it does something UWB cannot — confirm the exact part identity, cheaply, on every unit rather than on the reusable carrier.
Safety zones are a special case. Where a zone breach has to slow or stop a machine, the distance measurement is authorising an action, and secure ranging matters.
A sensible order of work.
- Map the process, not the floorThe stations that matter are the ones where time disappears. Instrument those first.
- Anchors above the lineMounted clear of moving steel, with geometry that survives a full buffer and a parked forklift.
- RFID at each stationAntennas positioned for the way parts actually present, not the way the drawing shows them.
- Tag the carriersReusable carriers take the powered tags. Items take passive labels.
- Wire it into the MESArrival and departure events feeding the system that already holds the work order.
If it works.
- Cycle time becomes a measurement with a distribution, not an average from a spreadsheet.
- Searching for tooling stops being invisible work.
- Safety interlocks respond to where people are rather than where a fence assumes they are.
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