Budweiser Budvar Brewery has leveraged Sewio RTSL to increase the indoor tracking system uptime, decrease maintenance costs and get additional insights into logistics operations.
Previously, the Budweiser Budvar Brewery was using a passive RFID solution to minimize human error while operating thousands of pallets with hundreds of varieties of beers using forklifts equipped with an RFID antenna at their chassis and RFID tags located at each of the tracked pallet positions. Due to the easily desynchronization or even damage of antennas the maintenance cost grew rapidly and the system uptime was only 80 percent.
In order to retain the process of minimizing human errors in logistics but crucially lower the maintenance costs and increase the system uptime, the company decided to replace the RFID-built system with Sewio RTLS powered by ultra-wideband technology using Decawave chip.
With the new implemented system, antennas are placed high above the actual traffic and the reliability of the system itself has resulted in 99 percent of system uptime. The newly acquired insights into the distance traveled and the utilization of each forklift have allowed Budweiser to better utilize the current warehouse, virtually growing it by 19 percent.
“While the initial cost for RFID versus UWB is almost identical, UWB undoubtedly outperforms RFID thanks to lower maintenance costs, lower risk of damage and higher accessibility and scalability of the system”, says Pavel Pánek, Head of Logistics at Budweiser Budvar. “In many uses cases, we see RFID and UWB RTLS complement each other well when integrated into a single solution. If our customer needs precise true location data provided by a scalable system with a low maintenance cost, UWB is then the right first and only technology to choose”, commented Milan Šimek, CEO of Sewio Networks.
