Traditional asset tracking has been in existence for many years; the difference in asset tracking today and in the future is how accessible these solutions are becoming. With advances in sensors, a greater variety of edge network types, and more powerful and automated IoT platforms, connecting things to each other, to local computing resources, and to the cloud has never made it easier to create your own real-time solution.

While there are hundreds of industry-specific use cases, I wanted to focus on the top five benefits our clients are experiencing, even with the most basic deployments. These solutions were chosen by asking questions like which assets within a building or public venue can be tracked, and how is value created when they are tracked?

Here is a shortlist of the operational and economic benefits of well-designed asset tracking systems:

Optimize Inventory Levels

Know exactly what you have in stock, whether products are on shelves, in the stockroom, or in the warehouse, and avoid overbuying and underbuying.

Understand the Usage of Equipment

Track the equipment, for example, generators, ventilators, tractors, and more, and redeploy those assets, so their value is maximized.

Maintain Equipment Predictively

Instead of time-consuming mandatory testing, reduce and expensive and inefficient inspection routines and schedule maintenance based on need and usage.

Reduce Loss and Theft

Use geofencing to track your most valuable assets to see in real-time when they leave the factory, warehouse, or job site. Find and transfer these assets more easily without having to replace them or write them down.

Know Where Your People Are

People monitoring solutions can be used for a wide variety of operational efficiency gains, from documenting entry and exit times that can automate team members’ timesheets, to getting a handle on conference room and office usage, to supporting safety measures in case of emergencies.

These five benefits add up to impressive ROIs when organizations instrument and track assets in real-time – when you add in the impact Asset Tracking can have on customer experience and sales, and there is a shift from reducing bottom-line expenses to growing the top line.

Serve customers better by having the right things in the right places at the right time. Dramatically improve logistics and ensure accuracy to fend off unhappy engagements that lead to expensive returns, cancellations, and refunds – while deepening loyalty.

It’s not difficult to imagine and understand the applications of asset tracking across nearly every industry, depending on what assets (people and things) are in a specific office building, manufacturing plant, airport, stadium, school, warehouse, hospital, or hotel. By bridging the physical and digital worlds with IoT, there is simply more visibility and insight to control and protect valuable assets.

At ClearBlade, we are seeing multipurpose implementations of asset tracking across many asset classes – for example, in one of the largest entertainment centers in the U.S., we are tracking parking spaces, foot traffic, and behavioral patterns with the same IoT platform used to track critical building equipment.

We built our technology to be open and flexible, making sure ClearBlade works with any sensor, any connected device, any communications protocol (5G, LoRa, BLE, Modbus, CAN bus, NB-IoT,  etc.) and with any application, including geospatial to follow the movement of assets in motion and at rest.

Our clients and partners appreciate a single platform that is able to track all assets and deliver information in a single pane of glass, with a consistent experience when it comes to alerts and notifications, avoiding a difficult to implement and manage a set of disparate IoT systems.

You can learn more about ClearBlade’s asset tracking technologies and solutions here – or simply connect with me on LinkedIn so we can share some of our most exciting implementations with you.

Originally posted by Eric Simone on LinkedIn Pulse