How Bluetooth® Technology Is Powering Smarter Manufacturing and Logistics Operations

The Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly at the forefront of digital transformation within industrial and logistics enterprises, as they look to combat a plethora of challenges today and over the next decade. Thanks to several inherent technology benefits, and the availability of differentiated and tailored solutions from leading solution providers, Bluetooth® technology is playing an increasingly vital role in this process, delivering enhanced end-to-end manufacturing and supply chain visibility, reducing downtime, bringing extensive operational efficiencies, and creating safer and more automated working environments.

This is being achieved through a number of transformative technologies, including real-time locating systems, smart labels, machine and environmental sensors, and data loggers, as well as robotics, Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs), and inventory management solutions. The continued innovation within Bluetooth® technology itself, growth of tailored industrial solutions, and increased convergence with Edge AI capabilities will all be critical in enabling Bluetooth® technology to realize its potential in powering smarter operations over the next decade and beyond.

One of the major ways Bluetooth® is enabling enhanced asset and inventory visibility is through Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS). A large and growing ecosystem of location service providers are deploying Bluetooth® to deliver increased productivity, improved staff and visitor safety and security, greater automation, reduced asset losses, and enhanced compliance and traceability. Over time, the Bluetooth® suite of positioning features has evolved significantly, with Angle of Arrival (AoA) and Angle of Departure (AoD) positioning techniques, also known as Bluetooth® Direction Finding, now enabling device direction alongside centimeter-level location accuracy. For example, the Kloeckner Metals Tulsa facility, in partnership with RTV Engineering and Quuppa, deployed a Bluetooth® RTLS solution to help reduce time being wasted on searching for materials. To achieve this, the deployment of 70 anchor points and 4,000 tags helped to automate the location tracking of materials and assets, enabling significant productivity enhancements. Load times were able to be reduced to just 7 minutes from 45 minutes, overtime was reduced by 11%, production increased by an additional 3 truckloads of steel per day (equating to US$15,000 to US$20,000), while further safety benefits were also observed. This resulted in a 4-month return on their investment. 

Meanwhile, a new category of Bluetooth® devices, known as smart labels, have the potential to drastically expand the tracking capabilities to a whole new class of items and products. There have been many recent high-volume deployments of both passive and active smart label solutions, and new entrants continue to innovate with their own unique solutions and tracking architectures, bringing strong competition to this space. ABI Research believes that this market, though still immature, has the potential to rapidly accelerate in the coming years and will be one of the largest volume opportunities for Bluetooth® technology over the next decade. In the United Kingdom, the Royal Mail partnered with Wiliot to deploy its battery-free Bluetooth® IoT Pixels on over 900,000 rolling cages and Bluetooth® readers in 8,000 vehicles, enabling automated real-time tracking and enhanced visibility across its whole delivery network. The deployment provided much greater visibility of inventory across 5,000 locations, discovered over 180,000 unaccounted for rolling cages worth over £20 million, and optimized labor and vehicle utilization.

The growing availability of Bluetooth® sensors now allows a new range of previously unconnected and unmonitored devices to share information and use predictive and preventative maintenance to enable smoother and safer operations, increase performance, ensure regulation compliance, and reduce the risk of costly downtime. ABB provides a Bluetooth® sensor that can be added to various industrial assets, such as motors, powertrains, fans, and other equipment, to provide extensive insight into machine health and performance. The sensor can detect even minor changes in equipment condition, enabling advanced warning of damage to bearings and other components. This, combined with advanced machine learning algorithms, can underpin proactive and predictive maintenance, allowing operators to take action to reduce the threat of downtime and increase the effectiveness and life span of their equipment. By leveraging Bluetooth® Low Energy (LE), the solution can support an up to 15-year battery life with hourly readings, while enabling equipment that is installed in challenging, hazardous, or difficult to reach locations to be monitored for the first time.

In addition to providing enhanced visibility and reducing downtime, Bluetooth® technology is also leveraged within manufacturing and logistics environments to help enhance productivity through greater automation, optimizing workflow, enhancing compliance and traceability, and enabling safer remote operation and control of industrial equipment. Several Autonomous Mobile Robots (AMRs) that can move pallets, boxes, carts, and other materials autonomously between different steps in the transport process are equipped with Bluetooth® so operators can configure route settings and monitor transportation tasks via a mobile app.

Bluetooth® technology continues to enable measurable productivity gains in manufacturing and logistics environments, alongside the wider supply chain. This is being achieved through several ways, including enhancing asset, material, and staff visibility, optimizing the utilization of existing equipment and reducing downtime through condition-based monitoring and predictive maintenance, automating compliance and records management, minimizing production errors, and enabling greater flexibility and remote control to optimize efficiency while minimizing risk.

As has been demonstrated, several inherent benefits of Bluetooth® technology make it well suited to enabling these productivity enhancements across these facilities, including:

• Strong resilience to interference and robustness enable Bluetooth® to be deployed in harsh industrial environments.
• Ultra-low power consumption can enable years of battery life for industrial sensors, reducing maintenance costs, while offering new categories of battery-free or energy harvesting asset tracking tags and smart labels. These can drastically enhance visibility of operations and illuminate supply chain challenges from component sourcing to delivery.
• To enable high volumes and scalability in this area, alongside maximizing Return on Investment (ROI), Bluetooth® technology is also very low-cost, while support for smaller form factors, including printed labels, is becoming vital.
• With many industrial deployments relying on connectivity to wireless access points, gateways, and industrial PCs, as well as smartphones, tablets, and wearables, the ubiquitous presence of the technology in these areas is a key advantage that can enable more seamless offloading of data to various record management systems and the cloud. The huge installed base of devices can also help decentralize smart label tracking networks across the supply chain.
• To connect to these devices seamlessly, in addition to more remote control and operations, Bluetooth® can also support extended range capabilities, delivering up to 100s of meters connectivity, which could be vital in larger scale facilities.
• Increased integration of Edge AI capabilities within Bluetooth® solutions will also help deliver more localized decision-making, reducing the time and cost it takes to transmit data to the cloud, further reducing power consumption and improving data privacy and enterprise security.
• It is vital that Bluetooth® technology continues to evolve its security to remain a trusted technology for mission-critical and safety-related processes.
• The availability of tailored solutions from leading Bluetooth® chipset and module providers is leading to the creation of differentiated, application-specific platforms that can help guarantee performance in these difficult environments and maximize performance and ROI.

The continued evolution of Bluetooth® technology, growth of tailored industrial solutions, and increased convergence with Edge AI capabilities will all be critical for Bluetooth® technology to realize its potential in powering smarter operations over the next decade and beyond. For more information on how Bluetooth® technology is powering intelligent industrial operations, see ABI Research’s latest market research note.