Material Handling Visualization for asset tracking and accurate location indoor and outdoor
On 19th April in Toulouse, UWINLOC officially launched MahVis, short for Material Handling & Visualization Solution. It is based on UWINLOC’s core, world first, best in class, energy harvesting tag technology. Already accepted in industry as being a significant breakthrough, UWINLOC’s battery-less, sustainable solutions are truly game changing for industry & logistics, facilitating the tracking, location and visibility of millions of assets simultaneously. No battery means zero maintenance and is an eco-friendlier approach to addressing scalable requirements.
The MahVis solution is the outcome of a two-year co-development partnership with ERAMET, MICHELIN & COLLINS AEROSPACE. The result is an unbeatable ROI (below 12 months) with an ultra-low TCO achieved through battery-less location tags which have similar functionality with regard to range and accuracy to that of battery driven technologies. It addresses another barrier for companies who have struggled to accelerate and scale with sensible investment into digital transformation. Traceability and visibility solutions being fundamental in the digitization approach.
Unlike UWINLOC’s Standard fixed infrastructure solution, MahVis is installed onto existing material handling machines, such as forklifts, pallet trucks or AGV’s. The solution requires minimal infrastructure. The easy to install unit consists of multiple modules such as an energy source to remotely power the tags, a UWB receiver to detect tag signals, as well as a GPS to provide accurate location of asset such as stillages, pallets and other assets outdoors.
“From our conversations with manufacturers worldwide, they all concur that it would have been impossible to implement existing active solutions available on the markets at scale. Active solutions most often require an extensive infrastructure and subsequently significant investment to cover civil works associated with cabling, power provision, and commissioning often over tens thousands of square meters.” said Eric Cariou, Co- founder and President at UWINLOC. Passive solutions, such as RFID or Bare codes, used for over 20 years, still require a lot of manual operations and provide no location. In a warehouse, on average, each product / parcel, is being scanned 8 times all along its life cycle. These manual operations are extremely costly as each product showering represents 6s per scans, and a lot of associated human errors (typically between 3 and 6%).
The MahVis system is a game changing solution as it is the only fully automated (no manual operation) scalable solution on the market available today capable of tracking and locating assets accurately in factories and warehouses, both indoor and outdoor with minimal infrastructure. To complement this uniquely disruptive solution, UWINLOC is introducing a new business model for MahVis. “We are moving from a hardware supplier to one where we are making the solution easy to consume for our customers with packaged services integral to the offering” Introducing “Location as a Service, better known as LaaS. A business model, which is enabling easy adoption and accessibility to our products.” added, Cassandre Le Corre, Sales and Marketing Director at UWINLOC.
This new business model eases the buying process for companies with limited spending latitude, and provides an all-inclusive hassle-free service (inc. maintenance, refresh, support…) with a monthly regular service fee.
The newly launched MahVis solution is opening a new, wide range of possibility for industrial and logistics players, with its low-cost, easily accessible solution and quick return on investment. Offering fully automated inventory control, automated stock information and visibility, through the accurate positioning and location of assets at all times. performing productive picking and dropping operations, which in turn reduces human interaction and related errors. For UWINLOC’s early end users this has led to multiple gains and as an example, overall gain of around 25% productivity on stocks management.
A new solution based on existing ‘breakthrough’ energy harvesting technology
The MahVis solution uses UWINLOC’s existing energy harvesting building blocks from its native core solution to remotely power the tags. The MahVis modules are installed onto forklifts and power the tags when they are being picked, moved, or dropped. The tag is then powered to regularly send its UWB Identification. Easy to Pair and Unpair, the UWINLOC battery-less tags are reusable, robust and offer the lowest TCO on the Market (less than 10€ over 10 years for hardened re-usable tags versus 200 to 300€ for a battery powered tag over the same period).
Indoor and outdoor tracking and location continuity.
The need to track and have a continuity of asset location from indoor to outdoor has always existed. Solutions such as battery assisted technology were used with combined LoRA or BLE & GPS but are way too expensive and often too fragile for rough outdoor environments. Their battery energy consumption leading to short life batteries and lots of costly maintenance which results in a poor ROI. RFID has also been used but provides no location indoor and often based on customer feedback, results in a high error rate outdoors. UWINLOC’s MahVis solution is finally offering a genuinely scalable solution enabling indoor and outdoor traceability with a quick ROI approach.
Flexible and user-friendly software solution
On top of this breakthrough technology, UWINLOC is providing a user-friendly application with concrete features helping operators to easily find their product, parts, pallet in one click, conduct automated inventory and operate a qualitative supply chain including right first-time delivery and efficient kitting operations. Thanks to an onboard load controller display, operators can easily get real time information on load and product content, enabling anomaly detection and receiving picking list.
About UWINLOC
UWINLOC, French based scale-up created in November 2015, with the mission to develop and commercialize next generation traceability and location solutions for company’s digitalization. Over the last 6 years, UWINLOC has established major partnerships with Integrators, distributors and system vendors in order to serve customers in Europe and in the US. Multiple MahVis deployments are currently scaling at several major industrial companies.
Media Contact :
Cassandre Le Corre – Sales Director
+33 6 42 86 12 70