Home/Industries/Warehousing & Logistics
IndustryEvery forklift, every pallet, every dock door.
Location inside the building, identity at the doors, and occupancy in the aisles — the three questions a distribution centre asks all day.
What is actually hard here.
A misplaced pallet is not lost — it is somewhere in the building, and finding it costs someone the better part of a shift. The cost is not the pallet; it is how often it happens and how invisible it is in any report.
Dock doors are where the expensive errors are made. A pallet on the wrong trailer is discovered at the far end of a journey, and the cost of the correction is out of all proportion to the cost of catching it at the door.
Meanwhile nobody has a reliable picture of congestion. Which aisles jam, when, and whether the slotting plan is the reason.
What it looks like on site.
The outputs worth having.
- Forklift position and route — continuously, including the reversing and waiting that never appears in a WMS.
- Pallet and tote location — where a unit was put down, not where it was supposed to be.
- Dock-door verification — what went on which trailer, confirmed by read order and direction.
- Pick-path efficiency — actual distance walked or driven per line picked.
- Aisle occupancy and congestion — from radar, with no tag on anyone.
- Near-miss mapping — where people and vehicles come close, plotted rather than reported.
Why these, and not the others.
UWB for anything that moves continuously and matters between scans: forklifts, tugs, high-value totes.
RFID at the choke points, which in a warehouse are numerous and well-defined. Dock doors, conveyor exits, put-away confirmation.
mmWave for the questions about people that should not require issuing people anything: aisle occupancy, pedestrian flow, crossing points.
A sensible order of work.
- Start at the docksRFID portals have the shortest path to a number the operation already argues about.
- Then the vehiclesA dozen UWB tags on forklifts is a small tag estate with a large amount of insight in it.
- Anchors above the rackingMounted high, surveyed properly, with geometry planned for aisles rather than open floor.
- Radar where people areCrossings, aisle ends, pedestrian routes.
- Into the WMSLocation and read events joined to the inventory record, not kept in a separate dashboard nobody opens.
If it works.
- “Where is it?” becomes a query rather than a search.
- Mis-ships are caught at the door rather than at the customer.
- Slotting and layout decisions get made from measured travel instead of intuition.
Does this look like your site?
Tell us the space, what moves in it, and the decision a position would change. We will tell you which technology fits and what a first deployment would involve.