The world is transforming at a steady speed due to technological development and advancement in IoT. Multiple IT solutions have affected almost all domains, which benefits all. Sectors like the Manufacturing industry can extract many benefits from IoT. The manufacturing industry comes among the major businesses with great economic worth and involves significant capital transactions. In addition, its operation involves an endless number of assets, ranging from simple tools to heavy equipment, vehicles, and fleets.
This requires different manufacturing businesses and companies to control and monitor such equipment and assets efficiently. This increases their maintenance and operational expense. Thus, to counter such crucial matters, IoT-based, Asset tracking solutions can play a vital role in a company’s progress. According to a survey, the Location-Based Services (LBS) and Real-Time Location Systems (RTLS) market expects growth from USD 16.0 billion to USD 40.0 billion by 2024. Therefore, given the importance of the manufacturing industry and the need for asset tracking systems, it is evident that the manufacturing industry can reap many advantages from utilizing the latter innovation. Below are several ways through which asset tracking technology can have positive impacts on manufacturing business:
Real-Time Monitoring Of Assets
It is pertinent that the absence of smart technology systems can lead to mistakes, errors, and improper monitoring. The manufacturing industry may face misplacement, loss, or theft of expensive and sometimes imported equipment. Moreover, the absence or inability to locate a tool during its need may become problematic. A manufacturer may buy or rent the required tool from another source.
Thus, here asset tracking solutions come into play. Asset tracking systems like TrackPro are IoT-enabled smart solutions that aid companies like manufacturing in constant monitoring of their assets. It uses GPS (Global Positioning System) sensors to track the assets’ real-time location, including tools and vehicles. This helps the company analyze the usage of their equipment in terms of areas and even limits them by creating virtual boundaries, also called geofencing. Also, an alert generates by this tracking system if your asset crosses that boundary. This way, manufacturing industries can prevent theft and misplacement and avert losses.
Optimized Use Of Resources
The manufacturing business includes a lot of operations and a huge number of tools of different sorts in the process. This burdens different operations as tools may get damaged due to overuse and demand early maintenance. Thus, there remains a possibility that some of the tools and instruments may remain unmonitored. Also, you can borrow the required tools from others, indebting you with future favors.
Different manufacturers and stakeholders can prevent these problems by adopting smart asset tracking solutions. This provides the data where your tools are located and acknowledges their frequency of use. This collection of data helps you analyze and increase the utilization and optimization of tools, assets, and equipment. Smart solutions like asset tracking can also help maintain a timely maintenance and repair schedule, increasing lifespan and the use of expensive resources.
Paperless Flexibility
As discussed above manufacturing business consist of complicated processes and operations. This may require the manufacturer to invest and rely on the paper medium heavily. This can further become difficult for stakeholders and workers when important documents and paperwork gets misplaced or destroyed. This can delay many operations and even invite some errors in data collection. Losses can incur, and manufacturers can earn a bad reputation among valuable customers.
Fortunately, Asset tracking systems are smart solutions that work on smart sensors connected with the digital web application. It pinpoints or highlights the real-time location digitally instead of physical maps. It collects the data on virtual storage rather than on a piece of paper. Also, different smart tags can be put on different resources and products to track their locations. This makes manufacturing procedures and tasks easy, efficient, and less complex. It also indirectly reduces the company’s investment in paper while benefiting mother nature and the environment.
Consistent Collaboration of Stakeholders
Since the manufacturing business usually consists of a huge network of workers, assets, and locations, it involves many stakeholders. It is difficult for everyone to be aware of things like order production, delivery, purchasing of assets, or the location and condition of fleet vehicles. It can become a time-taking or delaying process to keep informing different stakeholders about manufacturing operations.
However, IoT in manufacturing has revolutionized the working of the latter. Different smart sensor-based solutions and asset tracking systems can be adopted to make things easily accessible at any place, anytime. Systems as such work on smart devices and applications that can help in the consistent collaboration of all stakeholders regarding different issues and decision-making. This also helps them access the asset’s real-time location and monitor and analyze employees’ performance. Thus, IoT in manufacturing means easily accessible smart data and the presence of all stakeholders on a single point which can play a key role in making better decisions for the future.
Reduces Labor costs and Other Expenses
Generally, inspection, paperwork, and late maintenance add a significant ratio to the manufacturing business’s expenditure. Most of the revenue can be consumed in hiring individuals for inspection purposes which can cost a lot of fortune. This can affect any company adversely. Asset tracking systems can also be very beneficial in reducing labor costs and other expenses.
On the other hand, by adopting asset tracking systems like TrackPro, manufacturers can significantly reduce their spending on hiring laborers. Smart solutions like this are built with smart sensors that provide real-time location and information about fuel optimization, mileage, safety, speeding, and route mapping of assets and vehicles. Through such data, which is available on a digital app, early and timely maintenance of assets can be done, which can further avert losses. Also, such tracking solutions can monitor employees’ actions and analyze their movements. It can help the company to allocate them to new and urgent tasks quickly. Hence, it significantly prevents companies from arbitrary money waste by increasing their efficiency.
Improves Order Commitments
Asset tracking solutions can be valuable for the manufacturing industry regarding order delivery. Usually, with human intervention, an oversight can occur. For instance, the number of resources documented may vary, employees may commit some errors, or vehicles may face some delivery turbulence on the way. This can delay the order commitments. Nevertheless, with IoT in manufacturing, manufacturers can easily track, monitor, and record data and the location of different resources.
Moreover, this makes the manufacturing process reliable while increasing the ability of the business to deliver the order on time. Owing to such data-driven smart solutions, many manufacturers can predict and make intelligent decisions that aid them in keeping up with orders commitment and improving their relations with customers.
To Sum up…
In a nutshell, the asset tracking system can play a vital role in transforming the manufacturing industry. It provides the manufacturers with real-time locations of their assets and resources while helping them monitor the activities of their employees and the routes on which their fleet vehicles are running. This data further helps manufacturers and stakeholders in important decision-making while reducing their expense burden and improving overall customer satisfaction.
