During the preparation of the transport of cooling elements, things went wrong at Baltimore. All-Connects established a 'dialogue' between the finished goods and the forklift trucks.
Baltimore Aircoil Company (BAC) manufactures evaporative cooling towers and thermal storage solutions. The American company is part of the Amsted Industries group. Baltimore employs more than 2,000 people in facilities worldwide. Approximately 340 employees are active in the Belgian branch in Heist-op-den-Berg, which is also the European headquarters of BAC.
Because there were frequent problems in locating the correct finished products on the site, Baltimore looked for a solution to track them.
Ward Lemmens (Production Engineer) explains:
"We produce (sections of) cooling towers, which are assembled on site. On a typical day, there are about 150 of these sections on our site, ready to be transported to the customer. Often, it is quite a job to find the right elements. That's why we looked at how we could get a better overview of the finished products to greatly reduce the search work."
Baltimore devised a system to divide the warehouse into zones. The location of the cooling towers was recorded in a table, but it was not always possible to keep it up to date. Moreover, the available surface is quite limited and in peak periods elements had to be moved.
This experiment showed that automation was necessary. The first requested providers proposed to provide the 150 or so elements with a GPS tracker. Efficient, but with a (too) high price tag.
When Baltimore finally consulted All-Connects, a better alternative was soon on the table. The special thing about this track & trace solution is that it never leaves the Baltimore site. Each element that rolls off the production line is given a Bluetooth tracker. The eight forklift trucks are in turn equipped with a GPS tracker and a Bluetooth gateway.
"The system is ingenious in its simplicity. Every movement of the cooling tower activates the Bluetooth tracker and communicates with the tracker on the forklift truck. Thus, the exact location of the element on the site is always known. When loading the truck, the tracker is removed and reused for the next element," says Ward Lemmens.
Since it is a cloud-based solution, Baltimore carried out a data security risk assessment. The system was then tested on site. A few adjustments were necessary, as the application is slightly different from the standard product of All-Connects.
Ward looks back on the collaboration with satisfaction:
"We do not yet have concrete data to calculate the time and efficiency gains, but the employees involved clearly notice that everything is running better. We are also very enthusiastic about the possibility to link photos of cooling towers loaded on trucks to the system. That saves us a lot of unnecessary discussions afterwards. In short, All-Connects has certainly lived up to our expectations!"
Locating assets
A GPS + Bluetooth gateway was placed in the forklift trucks. A BLE (Bluetooth) tracker was attached to the cooling elements, which 'wakes up' when movement is detected and starts communicating with the BLE gateway of the forklift truck.
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