Making The Smart Factory A Reality With Real-Time Location Tracking
When you’re running a vast manufacturing and distribution hub, knowing where all your assets and people are at any given point – and being able to optimize their movements – is critical to smooth operations and profitability while maintaining a safe environment.
It’s a huge task, enabled to a great extent by one powerful technology: Nokia High Accuracy Indoor Positioning (HAIP). By delivering precise location information, HAIP is a key enabler to unlock all the benefits of digitalization and automation in a manufacturing or distribution hub.
What Is High Accuracy Indoor Positioning (HAIP)?
HAIP is a cutting-edge application designed to revolutionize asset management. With its advanced features, you can locate assets within minutes, optimize the utilization of shared resources, and introduce automated real-time inventory management. HAIP also enables location-based billing for shared assets, simplifying cost allocation and ensuring security within your premises with locally-processed data.
Should you require it, HAIP is fully equipped to offer coverage across much larger areas, including hospitals, educational campuses, high-security facilities, or care homes. Doing so becomes an invaluable tool for optimizing productivity and closely monitoring essential personnel and assets, including vehicles.
The real-time location tracking capabilities of HAIP open the door to many powerful use cases. From measuring performance to optimizing the workforce and enhancing safety and security measures, HAIP is a versatile solution that can elevate operations in various domains.
Efficient Vehicle Tracking and Fleet Management
HAIP’s vehicle tracking capabilities offer comprehensive fleet management solutions. By recording usage, setting zone guards, and issuing alerts in case of unauthorized vehicle movement, HAIP ensures an efficient and secure fleet operation. This feature proves especially beneficial in preventing vehicles from leaving the facility when they shouldn’t.
Enhanced People Tracking for Safety and Security
HAIP also includes robust people-tracking options that are vital in ensuring safety and security. During emergency evacuations, staff accountability is maintained with ease. Proper staffing levels can be maintained across operational areas, and restricted zones are better secured. Hospitals benefit from the quick location services for wandering patients, ensuring their safety at all times. With Nokia HAIP, you unlock a world of possibilities in asset management, vehicle tracking, and people monitoring.
Improving Sorting and Storage Efficiency
One way to optimize sorting and storage operations is by carefully examining the distribution of orders and the routes taken during picking activities.
Streamlining Layout to Minimize Unproductive Walking
To reduce unnecessary walking and enhance productivity, Nokia can identify packers’ walking patterns in terms of time and distance using tools like heat maps and trails.
Enhancing Visitor Tracking for Safety
Real-time visibility of visitor locations can help reduce risks by monitoring their movements and preventing them from entering hazardous areas.
Optimizing Material Handling Equipment (MHE) Utilization
By closely tracking the activity of Material Handling Equipment (MHE) within a designated area, you can identify and minimize non-active time to improve overall operational efficiency.
Enhancing Safety by Minimizing Risky Interactions
To prevent accidents and collisions, it is crucial to thoroughly understand situations when MHE comes too close to associates, posing potential risks. By identifying and reducing such occurrences, you can significantly improve overall safety in the workplace.
The High Accuracy Indoor Positioning (HAIP) system is delivering substantial productivity, efficiency, and safety benefits across Nokia’s expansive 4,000-square-meter Chennai factory. Nokia has successfully tagged over 400 critical assets to enable these advancements.
Key Features of HAIP include:
Geo Mapping and Route Navigation
The system efficiently maps assets’ locations and facilitates smart navigation within the warehouse.
Optimized Tracking of Automated Guided Vehicles (AGVs) and Warehouse Vehicles
HAIP ensures precise and optimized tracking of AGVs and other warehouse vehicles, enhancing their performance.
How HAIP Works
The HAIP system operates on a simple premise: battery-operated asset tags utilize Bluetooth technology to communicate with locators installed in the ceiling. This innovative approach combines low-energy Bluetooth connectivity with Nokia Bell Labs Angle of Arrival (AoA) advanced technology to achieve a remarkably accurate location determination. The data collected from locators are aggregated, sent to an edge server, and then processed.
Deployment in Nokia’s Chennai Factory
In Nokia’s Chennai factory, HAIP is securely deployed on the Nokia Digital Automation Cloud (DAC) edge server. This ensures automatic updates and grants access to leading-edge connectivity options and other digital transformation applications. While Nokia currently uses HAIP as part of Nokia DAC with Private LTE (PLTE), the system is versatile enough to function as a standalone application on the DAC edge cloud without relying on PLTE network connectivity.
Integration with Digital Twin Platform
HAIP APIs are seamlessly integrated with the factory’s digital twin platform hosted on the Azure IoT platform on-premise. This integration empowers the HAIP solution to tap into the entire ecosystem of cloud applications running in the factory, thereby extending its impact and scope. The platform’s remote factory visualization capability further enhances the HAIP solution’s overall effectiveness.Overall, HAIP is a game-changer, delivering unmatched accuracy and revolutionizing Nokia’s factory operations with its advanced features and seamless integration with existing systems.
Enhance Search Efficiency with Asset Geo-Mapping and Route Navigation
Realizing that manual asset tracking was no longer effective, the need for digitization became evident. By integrating HAIP with Nokia’s existing asset management system, the organization now benefits from a user-friendly dashboard that functions like an indoor GPS for Nokia’s warehouse operations. This integration ensures seamless navigation for people and assets, directing them along the fastest routes to their destinations.
With this implementation, Nokia’s team has gained invaluable real-time visibility into asset utilization, leading to significant productivity and efficiency improvements. Specifically, Nokia has achieved a remarkable 20% increase in productivity and efficiency through optimized space and layout management. Additionally, the time spent on searching for assets has been drastically reduced, with HAIP enabling the organization to locate assets five times faster, representing an impressive 80% reduction in search times.
Streamlined Warehouse Operations through Smart Put-Away/Picking
HAIP APIs seamlessly integrate with Nokia’s put-away/picking application, significantly assisting warehouse operators in efficiently navigating within the warehouse. The route navigation algorithm plays a vital role in optimizing their movements by continuously identifying the best paths based on real-time tracking and the movements of other users. This intelligent approach ensures that operators are always directed along the most optimal routes, enhancing overall efficiency and productivity within the warehouse.
Revolutionizing AGV/Warehouse Vehicle Tracking and Utilization
HAIP introduces a game-changing solution to easily locate and track moving vehicles within the Chennai factory. The HAIP network enables real-time tracking of vehicles, including Autonomous Intelligent Vehicles (AIVs) and forklifts, overcoming the limitations of traditional Wi-Fi-based tracking systems commonly found in modern vehicles. This enhanced tracking system ensures reliability, even in the challenging factory environment, providing valuable insights for efficient and safe production floor management.
Key Features of HAIP for Vehicle Tracking
Real-time Asset Visibility
Through HAIP’s dashboard, operations gain a reliable view of each moving vehicle’s precise location, facilitating better monitoring and decision-making.
Near-Collision Detection
HAIP’s capabilities include detecting potential collisions in real-time, helping prevent accidents and ensuring a safer working environment.
Geofencing
The system supports geofencing, which allows for setting virtual boundaries within the factory floor to restrict or control the movement of vehicles in designated areas.
Accurate and Predictable
HAIP’s asset tag, combined with hard-wired locators and Bluetooth technology using the Angle of Arrival (AoA) method, ensures high accuracy and predictability in tracking vehicle locations.
Optimizing Operations and Maintenance
By leveraging HAIP’s insights, operations can continuously monitor and improve vehicle usage, optimizing operations in real-time. Identifying under-utilized or stationary vehicles allows for better resource allocation and more informed decision-making. This data-driven approach also supports implementing a smart and proactive maintenance program, ensuring that vehicles remain in peak condition, minimizing downtime, and maximizing efficiency.
Remarkable Productivity Improvement
With HAIP’s implementation, material management has seen a remarkable 20% increase in productivity. The system’s intelligent vehicle tracking and utilization capabilities have undoubtedly played a significant role in achieving this impressive enhancement.
In summary, HAIP’s transformative AGV and warehouse vehicle tracking and utilization system offer real-time visibility, safety enhancements, and data-driven insights to optimize operations and foster a more efficient and productive factory floor.
Reasons to Partner with Nokia for HAIP Deployment
Whether you manage a factory, warehouse, hospital, office, care home, or high-security facility, having accurate real-time position data for assets, vehicles, and personnel is of immense value. By choosing HAIP, you can optimize your operations and enhance overall efficiency in various ways:
Real-Time Asset Tracking
Gain the ability to locate assets in real-time, enabling streamlined operations and enhanced resource management. HAIP offers 2D/3D positioning using AoA, delivering submeter accuracy for precise location tracking.
Improved Asset Utilization
HAIP facilitates better utilization of shared assets, ensuring maximum efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
Location-Based Billing
Implement location-based billing for shared assets, enabling accurate and fair cost allocation.
Optimized Site Layout
Utilize the data provided by HAIP to optimize site layouts and enhance the overall workflow.
Enhanced Security
Prevent loss and theft with real-time tracking and gather valuable data as proof for legal purposes.
Investing in the Future
Partnering with Nokia for HAIP deployment is an investment in the future. The platform seamlessly supports multiple positioning technologies, ensuring long-term benefits and adaptability to future advancements.
Integration with Nokia Digital Automation Cloud
Seamlessly integrate with the industry-leading Nokia Digital Automation Cloud application framework and catalog.
Automatic Software Upgrades
HAIP features a managed edge server that automatically handles software upgrades, reducing maintenance efforts.
Low Maintenance
Once configured and calibrated, the solution requires minimal maintenance, allowing you to deploy and forget.
Analytical Capabilities
Leverage off-the-shelf features and visualization capabilities like multi-floor maps, geofencing, heatmaps, and collision detection for in-depth analysis and operational improvements.
Open APIs
HAIP offers open APIs, enabling you to leverage data for further analytics and custom applications.
By partnering with Nokia for HAIP, you gain a comprehensive solution that empowers your business with accurate real-time positioning data and the tools needed to optimize operations, enhance security, and build a more efficient future.
About Infinity Technology Solutions
With Nokia’s complete portfolio of networking solutions at our fingertips, Infinity Technology Solutions has decades of experience installing, maintaining, and optimizing networks for various industries.
