4 Ways How to Improve Worker Productivity with a Real-Time Location System

Real-time location tracking systems (RTLS) are becoming an increasingly valuable solution for manufacturing businesses in many industries.

In fact, the global RTLS market has been gaining prominence in recent years (it’s projected to increase by over 17 percent annually), as more and more companies realize the benefits of using the solution for asset tracking, productivity monitoring and reducing costs.

Sure, tagging an asset such as a forklift is an effective solution to capture inefficiencies in intralogistics and get data for optimization purposes. But there’s one use case of RTLS that is gaining much more attention as well as some concerns from employees than forklift tagging.

That’s employee tracking.

While it may seem that tracking in the workplace is a reason to be worried, the solution is used solely for performance analysis (besides, you’re probably already being tracked by your smartphone or laptop already, and this has nothing to do with productivity).

The reality is that tracking employees provides a lot of value in areas such as workflow, supply chain, and overall productivity analysis, because it allows obtaining the movement data necessary for process optimization.

In this article, we’re going to review four ways a manufacturing business can improve worker productivity with a real-time location system (no “Big Brother”-style scenarios here).

How do You Track Employees in a Manufacturing Facility or a Warehouse?

A real-time asset location system based on accurate solutions like Ultra-wide band (UWB) technology uses easy-to-carry, unobtrusive-to-wear tags given to workers. These tags can also be used as access cards and can help to track human movement in real time across vast industrial spaces like warehouses and production facilities.

The tags transmit data to collectors — hubs — that ensure that a manager can see a real-time picture of employee movement.

A tag and a hub used by Indoorway InSites 4.0 RTLS

Thanks to this easy-to-install infrastructure, businesses can benefit in the following ways.

How to Improve Employee Productivity with a Real-Time Location System

1. Reduce the Time Searching for Workers

It’s not uncommon for managers to look for on-site employees, especially for those working in large manufacturing facilities and warehouses. Often, it’s a time-consuming process that reduces the overall productivity of the workforce because the manager can spend a lot of time until he or she can finally locate the employee.

On the other hand, using a location system to get an up-to-date information on the location of employees could be useful to them to reduce the time needed for the search.

2. Improve Task Assignment Process

If a manager needs to assign an urgent job for someone is a specific area of their facility, he or she can take advantage of the real-time tracking system as well. For example, the system helps to identify the nearest person to that area, so the manager can contact them and let them know about the task that needs to be completed.

3. Optimize Employee Shifts

According to the Supply & Demand Chain Executive magazine, an average warehouse worker wastes 6.9 weeks on unnecessary movement annually. That’s 265 million hours of labor lost due to poor optimization of shifts and a lack of tools needed to comprehend and recognize wasted motion.

By using a real-time solution, managers can record employee movement data during shifts and see their real activity levels.

For example, our own Indoorway InSites 4.0 RTLS defines employee activity levels by calculating the number of times a tracked employee entered a specific area of the facility during a shift. The manager then can review this information in an analytical report created based on the tracking data.

For a manager, this could be useful because the data can help to discover:

• the most time-consuming tasks (for example, these can be identified by comparing employee activity levels in certain facility areas)
• reasons for different shift performance (delays, uneven work distribution, etc.)
• potential process bottlenecks and inefficiencies (cluttered or unoptimized warehouse space etc.)
• issues that lead to delays and underperformance (an insufficient number of employees working in a single shift etc.)

As a result, the manager could come up with solutions for optimizing shifts based on the movement data collected by a real-time location system and discussing them with the personnel.

4. Optimize Workflows

By collecting data on employee work patterns during specific manufacturing processes as well as the time they spend to complete them, the manager can:

• Discover the best practices and shortest employee paths based on the shortest time of process completion
• Support product line and intralogistics workers by guiding them to deliver urgent tasks and requests quickly (for example, by tagging the tools or materials they require to complete their processes faster)
• Update workflows based on real employee movement and feedback
• Optimize resources for improved workflows.

Employee Tracking: a Way to Improve Employee Productivity

As you can see, real-time employee tracking can deliver a lot of value to manufacturing business by helping with optimization of workflows, employee shifts, task assignment, and employee search.

Combined, these benefits allow manager to improve workforce productivity and help to make a transition to more effective manufacturing and intralogistics by providing real employee movement data.