RTLS Challenges in IoT and Asset Tracking | IoT For All Podcast E124 | WISER Systems’ Logan Maxwell

RTLS Challenges in IoT and Asset Tracking | IoT For All Podcast E124 | WISER Systems’ Logan Maxwell

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you are listening to the iot for all media network hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the iot for all podcast on the iot for all media network i'm your host ryan chicone one of the co-creators of iot for all now before we jump into this episode please don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or join our newsletter at iotforall.com newsletter to catch all the newest episodes as soon as they come out before we get started does your business waste hours searching for assets like equipment or vehicles and pay full-time employees just to manually enter location and status data you can get real-time location and status updates for assets indoors and outdoors at the lowest cost possible with leverage's end-to-end iot solutions to learn more go to iot changes everything dot com that's iot changes everything.com so without further ado please enjoy this episode of the iot for all podcast welcome logan to the iot for all podcast thanks for being here this week absolutely happy to be here yeah it's great to have you let's start off by having you give a quick introduction about yourself to our audience anything that you think is relevant from your background experience and kind of how you ended up at wiser systems sure um so i is one of the first employees here at wiser so that's exciting to kind of see us grow from that stage literally working in a closet to to where we are now which is um still small but a lot larger than that um technical background i do have an engineering degree but in wiser i typically do kind of pre-sales uh technical sales project management that sort of thing fantastic so tell me a little bit more and tell our audience a bit more about wiser systems kind of what you all do the role in iot that you all play and it's kind of your overall offering to the market sure um i'll try to strip out some of the details here to keep it succinct but we've been around a while um we were actually formed way back um you know 10 11 years ago at this point and that was just based off of some research grant ideas to do real-time location technologies um so the early days were just developing different kinds of technology a few failed ideas a few successful ideas um and then came up with an ultra wide band approach wrap some patents around that were able to raise some initial funds uh and then from there about the past two to three years we've actually had a product uh that we can sell into the marketplace fantastic um so let me ask you if there are any before we kind of get into some of these these uh more high-level questions i wanted to ask if you could share any potential use cases or deployments that you have going on that would kind of connect this awful circle to kind of give some real-life examples to our audience sure um so we are we are under nda uh with most of our clients but i can kind of give some general overviews so to back it up a few steps wiser we provide a real-time location sensor system so you can kind of think of it like gps but it can be used indoors and in strange metallic environments in manufacturing so one of my favorites to say um is that there is now a wiser tag on every bus in columbus ohio so if you happen to be in columbus ohio there's a weiser tag around you somewhere because it's on all the buses so that's that's been fun um that partner kind of scaling out on the transit side so that's a fun one to point at very cool so let me um let's talk about um rtls for a little bit here so real time location systems it's a very popular thing in the iot space there probably is a subset of our audience who's unfamiliar with it or has heard rtls but is unsure exactly what it is if you go into detail for a bit uh just kind of explain what rtls is and the technologies that really play a role in that and at the same time maybe connect that to kind of work in progress tracking and kind of how those relate sure yeah so real time location systems is kind of a sub-section like a niche section of what you could think of as like barcoding or rfid or just like traditional locating and asset management processes so you can you've probably seen it or not noticed but like you you're going through a store um and then they have the little uh the tags embedded in a product that you can't just walk out the door right there's those big readers all the way out the door and that'll beep right so that's like that's what we call like a passive rfid and so you've seen it at places like best buy and that sort of thing but that's actually also used in industry to track uh assets and projects and products as they move through manufacturing as well um so that starting with that is the basis of like okay that's location technologies and rfid rts in specific is like real time location and that is now taking that gate-based approach and thinking of it like the you know the marauders map from harry potter or you know some kind of video game you know if you grew up playing video games like you know tom clancy's ghost recon and you're kind of looking down at the map of everybody moving and so you have that real time in motion of blips moving on a map which is you would think that technology is already prevalent and is has been already done but it's actually a pretty tough nut to crack so we're just now seeing not just why is there other other companies as well getting into that space and doing it well um does that help explain to some degree yeah yeah i think i think so um can you can you talk a little bit more about just the general um technologies behind it and then just some examples in other industries that you've seen rtls kind of deployed now works sure so there's a few different technologies that that you can utilize for rtls um one of the most traditional methods was just trying to convert the traditional wi-fi routers to do it because they're prevalent already in infrastructure right so most organizations or office spaces and environments will have these wi-fi routers and so trying to triangulate position based off of wi-fi signaling you can also use bluetooth is pretty common that's probably the most common at this point is using bluetooth and bluetooth test wasn't necessarily originally developed for that purpose but later bluetooth has done a pretty good job at trying to determine relative positions um we have tried everything and really have settled on what we call is called ultra wide band we have kind of a special blend of it that we call rrlt uwb but you know without getting too techy basically ultra wideband is um a type of signal that's really predominantly built for justice it's built for location in the sense that it's a wide array of a bunch of frequencies chirping at a very fast click and so even if you're in a very reflective metallic environment the sensors can still pick up the true signal and locate it well in in space and time so you any person listening might have actually been in an industry or somewhere where rtls is already happening especially with these wi-fi systems but there we're really only now seeing the first full-fledged rtls systems being put into play with uh bluetooth and ultra wideband in particular gotcha okay very cool um yeah we've been kind of exposed to a lot of different rtls use cases and examples and i think it's becoming very prominent in the in the iot space where do you kind of see it going over let's say the next 12 to 18 months do you see any kind of new developments or any new potential applications of rtls in certain industries that you're kind of forward looking into or or or kind of guess we'll kind of come out of all this yeah well i think you know looking looking back i mean the whole the covid situation has really sparked a lot of interest in rtls um in terms of you know being able to enforce social distancing um and seeing how folks move through a space um and making sure that you can abide by all the regulations that are required to maintain a site and keep your people safe um and a lot of that has been has been mostly bluetooth because it's it's around it's easier to get and a lot of times all that's needed is proximity spaces uh proximity alerts you know so moving into the 12 to 18 month you know i think you're going to see a lot of based on that initial rekindling um some visitor batching people are going to say hey this is possible right covet we started seeing this seep in with covet hey there's gonna some pilots got started this is this is a solvable problem to some degree so we're going to start seeing hey how can we do visitor access badges visitor passes contractor movement um that sort of thing with secure facilities yeah i'm very like some of the conversations we've had lately on the show is talking about just um kind of how kobud's been influencing things too um and making workplaces more safe do you kind of see that as the appropriate application as as we kind of build these new use cases because of the pandemic yeah it certainly sparked some interest i mean without you know speaking from our company specifically um our real value cell i guess was okay you know once this infrastructure is in place you don't necessarily have to keep this on your people you know you can take the tags once everybody's moving around and shipped it on to pallets or you know any type of your work process machinery that you're manufacturing um and gain a lot of analytics and insight from that so you know it definitely brought to bear hey we need to do this we need to find uh technology that can triangulate and find position indoors but it really didn't stick as much because they're like hey once this is over what are we going to do with this so we're just trying to combat that so to speak you know because once it's over hey you know do we still need to get alerts when somebody's within two meters of somebody else probably not you know probably right yeah yeah i'm very curious to kind of see what gets uh what kind of use cases we've seen a lot of different use cases move to the top of the kind of priority list for companies because of the pandemic some you know this is obviously was unforeseen from a lot of a lot of organizations out there so um i'd be curious how time or how how some of these deployments are used now and then like you're saying kind of into the future will they still be necessary um but i definitely think it's been kind of turning people's thought process around a little bit and starting to think about something maybe they weren't necessarily prepared for so that their organization is able to kind of combat anything like this that may happen again one day i'm hopefully not but it could right yeah well fingers crossed yeah yeah exactly um so let me let me um so some of the other use cases you mentioned um were associated with work in progress tracking um how does that differ or is that pretty much the same thing as rtls yeah so you don't have to have rtls to track your work in progress i guess in the sense of what how wisers fit into the modern iot ecosystem has been we create these sensors that give you really nice coordinate location and time stamps of where the tags are in your facility and traditionally in a lot of these manufacturing environments they have a work order it gets scanned initially and then it gets scanned at every station you know so yeah and basically what folks have been doing is they've been taking a wiser tag putting it on the asset at the very beginning and then as it moves through the facility they don't actually have to scan it at every station i hear you right so it's automatically kind of registering when it enters a new zone or new stage exactly you got it right so it's you know you can do work in progress tracking without rtls but rtls really simplifies the process i mean really honestly just kind of automates the whole thing um and so we've we've seen that being picked up in a lot of these heavier industries that are working around metal and it's just harder to get any sort of rfid and bluetooth system to work um yeah so we've found ourselves getting a lot of traction there very cool um in one of the other use cases let's see on here i have a list of a couple so aerospace automotive heavy machinery yard management um with using the wiser where are you kind locator seeing the biggest trend in adoption kind of on this on the side of things yeah so you know we talked about the working process and that's really a lot of times manufacturing heavy industry machinery as we mentioned but there's been actually a few different kind of what i wouldn't didn't expect as i mentioned i was kind of been working here from really the inception and i did not expect to get the initial roi in these categories and one of them is the yard management category where you have these big indoor and outdoor but you know half and half yards of either trucks or transit you know you've got buses and trains and you know it's like basically the the systems that we've installed have been say trucks for instance uh okay we have uh two distribution centers the drivers uh drive up to the security gate and then the wiser tag is on the truck it gets registered by the wiser mesh the driver gets a cell phone notification of exactly where to go while he is at the security gate he pulls right he pulls into the very specific space and you know you would think the gps could handle a lot of that but it doesn't have the kind of per second update rate that wiser rtls would have and it doesn't have the accuracy to quite get you exactly to the dock bay so we're tracking these trucks in right to their space say hey go to space 22 and then we can say hey to the second when they got the space 22 and then we also have because we're giving those time stamps we have dwell time how long did it take for that to be full and for these right this is a large retail client and these distribution centers all of that is very good metrics for them to trim down their processes so okay um that's one side of yard management the other side of your manager i was mentioning before that is i has been really fun is uh you know every city bus in columbus for instance right so you know as these buses kind of move into a yard um basically a sign tells them where exactly to park so that they can stack appropriately right so that they don't have to pull out 14 buses ahead of the last bus so they can go get washed or go get maintenance you know that sort of thing and then you know prioritizing so they're all in the right order to pull out in the morning it's not necessarily where i envisioned our technology being used right out of the box but there's certainly um certainly a demand for it which is exciting absolutely yeah it's very exciting um so let's let's move out a little bit away from just specifically talking about rtls here and talk about some little high-level conversation pieces that i think will be interesting so obviously with the connection of more user data worldwide it's a very exciting thing to just think about there's a lot of benefits but at the same time there's a lot of risks and there's some things that potentially could be concerning to people i'd love to get your take on kind of how the connection of more user data worldwide is not only exciting but also potentially concerning and at the same time what are the major benefits and risks associated with it yeah that's that's um that's a big topic so you know um we've actually we have been installed at a site where we are tracking people um and you know they weren't very excited about that initially um and so it having some firsthand experience about that sort of uh location data being associated to on a per person basis um in the work environment obviously maybe different from from a personal environment but i can see there go is going to be some backlash as to your point there certainly could be some positive aspects out of it like you know if you think about like minority report you walk into a giant uh box store you know let's just say i'm walking into home depot or something and they can say hey you know hello logan maxwell um we know it's you because you're wearing a wiser tag and where do you want to go and i can say hey i need this this and this and then boom they can t tell me step by step direction right right um and this might be we can talk about this later but eventually wanting the phone to be the wiser tag is something that wiser's targeting in particular as uwb becomes more prevalent in phones but suffice to say the wiser tag would either be on me or on my phone which would be even better and then my phone can say hey go to aisle223648 in that order with your cart get all your things i never have to have another human interaction that is exciting to me yeah you know maybe just maybe maybe it's because i've been doing too many home projects during quarantine but you know that part is very cool like tying that data to me and my purchase history but on that same token knowing everything i've purchased knowing everywhere i've been in all of those stores if conglomerated above the store level so say home depot walmart and everybody starts sharing that information then you can start creating a very intense personal history of every single person and i feel that although that could also be used for good in the sense of targeting very specific marketing to people for products that they want and need that could also be abused as we've already seen i think um to try to you know micro target some advertising to get people to buy unnecessary things right right that's great um and one other question i had for you was around kind of the real world application of iot and comparing that to kind of the marketing hype around iot so um obviously iot has kind of transformed from as an acronym from m2m and you know it's it's obviously been around for a while but once you attach something like a buzzword to iot you know obviously the expectations of connected devices and the kind of projection just went through the roof over the last number of years kind of looking into the future so i wanted to kind of ask you more about kind of the marketing hype around iot and its actual performance like the disconnect between you know these buzzwords that that they sometimes kind of draw to themselves and the actual uh practicality of completing real world iot projects and kind of how those relate and also conflict yeah i mean and i think you nailed it it's just kind of separating the the catchy kind of trendy market phrases versus like hey what have you actually deployed that's gotten roi um and a lot of this is coming from trade shows too in particular like everybody's kind of talking their latest good which is really just kind of a cobbled together prototype you know it's like you're gonna hesitate to find it maybe this is a bad example but ces is rife with this it's just like okay cool you kind of cobbled together a cool hypothetical prototype of some sort of iot deployment but it would be a lot more invigorating to me to see somebody say hey this is a real use case we deployed these sensors this is the amount of cash we saved you know it's sometimes harder to quantify and it's sometimes hard to break ndas as it is with wiser but you know seeing those being deployed so there in a general sense does seem to be a disconnect between industry 4.0 we're probably up to 5.0 at this at this point who knows right you know industry uh industry x.0 um you know iot

iiot and just using those uh to wrap these these deployments and just say hey yeah this is a iot deployment um but really what it is is you know you have a pilot and that's that's great um or you started down that road and then what you ended up doing was just beefing up your existing barcode and that's fine too um but that's not really an iot deployment um something like it's out in that category so it's right there's a there's definitely a sometimes a disconnect between the two that isn't to say that there aren't some great examples of people being able to pull some things off but it's been interesting to kind of try to wade through the marketing height in particular with wiser coming in on the rtls angle it's like hey we've got a real-time location system and everybody's like oh i've heard that one before so yeah it is interesting to kind of see just the the application of the different technologies that make up an iot solution to fit to different use cases and learning how you know certain use cases you can kind of buy off the shelf customize and deploy while other ones are very custom and i think it's um iot is much more difficult than people people think um to to deploy i mean obviously smaller scale yeah you can do it but trying to do some of these enterprise applications that are larger scale and really you know have a strict roi that a company's looking for in order to to justify it it's um you know it really relies on a a um a partner ecosystem to be rather sophisticated the technologies to be sophisticated and just there to be a really general understanding of not just the use case which is usually um probably the trickiest part for an iot solutions company or or systems integrator whoever's building the solution to understand because they don't live in that industry but um you know if they're able to really grasp all the different technologies that are available it's it's usually possible to make a solution that fits kind of the characteristics of the solution at a affordable cost so um yeah from your perspective what have you kind of seen as like the biggest challenges in iot adoption um from your guys angle yeah when you talk to companies and engage with them like what are their concerns it's that i mean yeah you i think you were you were just talking about it to some degree is that it's like okay you've got this you got the problem the problem has already been figured out and they honestly typically are going to have some sort of you know cost analysis based on that problem already right okay that's the first challenge done we figured out there's this issue now we have to solve it with iot we think so now it comes down to cobbling together a bunch of disparate sensors and groups and partners to create a solution or trying to find something turnkey and those are two different paths and both can work if you're going to turn key route typically it's with a large organization that has a big old dashboard suite and a whole bunch of partners and sometimes it can be quoted as turnkey it's not quite you know there's always going to be some some development but really the the big question is who's tying all this data together right and where is the data going and so what we find and again just speaking from personal wiser experience it's hey we can we can dump you all this coordinate data and time stamp data like we can tell you very accurately you know not to boast but you know very accurately where all your tags are in your facility but that isn't really useful to you you need to know when work order 33 hits polishing and then just tell steve to get down there with the polishing kit you know you don't care that tag you know x is at y location um so it's how are you getting that data tied in and some uh companies that we've been working with have actually been very forward thinking in allocating resources towards these internal groups they have you know new product and iot kind of groups that are built to kind of build those bridges and build the middleware and connecting tissue between these sensors and that's been really exciting to see so if you it's honestly been where if you can get to an organization that has one of those groups you're like hey okay like this right you'll be able to pull some sensors off the shelf and and kind of make this happen but that's a big challenge for folks that don't have that right totally agree totally agree um so as we're kind of discussing or kind of alluding to some challenges i wanted to if we bring it back to the rtls discussion when you talk to customers and engage with potential potential organizations what suspicions or questions do they have about rtls in general like do they have concerns that it won't function in the environment that the company has created and you know kind of perfected over the years or where the biggest kind of concerns lie um on the rtls i think this is a good question to kind of wrap up with sure yeah um i think you again alluded to it i mean it's certainly needing to know that it's going to work in their environment traditional rfid and bluetooth it does not perform exceptionally well in these you know cluttered manufacturing metallic environments just inherent to the technologies so they need to know it works uh there which you know we we typically uh pre-cove it and and now the code is wrapping up are able to actually come on site with a small kit set it up in the environment and get over that hurdle um the second hurdle is typically you know scalability right so they're like well cool we saw you come in here with you know a few antennas and set it up real quick and show us at work and that's awesome but we want to do the whole plant it's like okay right so that's that's typically the second question and fortunately i'm able to say at this point which i would not have been able to say three years ago is we have skilled so yeah right right i'm not very much more confident in selling these folks hey yeah absolutely you know we can put you up hundreds of nintendos thousands of tags we got you because we now fortunately have done it but um that's typically the next hurdle and then that that final hurdle um is you know what are you going to do with the data which we kind of already talked about but in specific to rtls it really is can you give me the accuracy and can you get it to the scale that i need to get to or the typical big ones gotcha okay i appreciate kind of these insights you know we don't get to cover uh we haven't really had at least too many experts on the rtls side come on here but it like i mentioned earlier it's a very popular topic um in the iot space you know anytime we get into real time anything obviously that's a big value for on the iot side and then you know anytime we can unders better understand the location of assets or kind of people anything that's moving around they seem to be the most at least early adopted solutions um and i'm curious to see kind of how that continues to pick up as technology continues to improve hardware continues to improve tags improve et cetera and i think what you all are doing is is you know a great fit for for the industry and it's fantastic that you guys are having a lot of success it seems like obviously you know obviously last year was tough for a lot of companies on the cobit side but it seems like wiser systems is doing great so so congrats on all that and i really appreciate your time uh being here today yeah absolutely we're excited to be here and excited to see how things shape with the market yeah um but to wrap up here would you mind just kind of um i guess two things one is there any are there any kind of news or exciting things happening on the wiser systems front in the next six months or so that our audience should look out for and then on top of that if anybody has questions wants to engage a little bit more what's the best way to do that yeah absolutely so i i we're looking forward to trade shows coming back uh so not too many um if you you know if you're a current client obviously we're we're working on new features and releases for your software packages so that'll be exciting having one of those very soon uh we are going to be at some trade shows virtually um later in the year some manufacturing manufacturing technology shows um but then absolutely when when things start kicking up in person we're looking forward to maybe being at ces next year for instance it's going to be a big one for us uh coming up in 2022. and then obviously to get in touch with us visit our website we do have a forums that you fill out that'll get you directly in touch with somebody here at wiser you obviously feel free to call as well although with covid our our office phones are all forwarding to our our home phones these days but yeah just just feel free to reach out get in touch we got white papers on the website as well that's wisersystems.com awesome well i appreciate it i appreciate the time a lot of a lot of good insights shared here today i think our audience will get a lot of value out of it um but yeah you know this is a great great introduction to kind of the company through iot for all um and you know we look forward to hopefully building a relationship with you all so that our audience can learn more about rtls learn more about what you have going on you know solutions uh deployments out there um because i think the industry could benefit a ton from it so so again thank you so much for your time and um appreciate it yeah absolutely happy to be here appreciate the opportunity absolutely all right everyone thanks again for joining us this week on the iot for all podcast i hope you enjoyed this episode and if you did please leave us a rating or review and be sure to subscribe to our podcast on whichever platform you're listening to us on also if you have a guest you'd like to see on the show please drop us a note at ryan iotfrl.com

and we'll do everything we can to get them as a featured guest other than that thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time

2021-07-18 15:18

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