Reliability, Reliability, Reliability

By Adrian Jennings.

As a company developing and selling location-based solutions is all too easy to slip into thinking that “location, location, location” is the critical factor. After all, why not? That’s the whole point, isn’t it?

Well, rarely actually: very few users of location-based solutions are directly interested in the location of things. It’s far more likely that the location of things is used as an indicator of the status of things, and it’s process-status that is critical in terms of efficiency and quality. Ubisense’s VIP application is a great example of this: users’ don’t so much care where items are in the factory so much as where they are in the process (which, oh by the way, we infer from where they are in the factory).

So maybe the adage for location-based solutions is “status, status, status”? That’s closer to the truth, but still not quite. When we stop thinking about location and start thinking about status we have started to see these solutions from a customer perspective: it’s not about the tags and sensors, it’s about the business value of the application that consumes location data. So indeed, “status” is critical thinking for a vendor in this space, and that’s becoming commonplace: Ubisense alone has solutions focused on manufacturing process visibility and control (VIP, ACS), tool accountability (Asset Manager), transport facility management (TYM), military training (LDT) and we’re just getting started.

When it comes down to it however, when a company rolls out these solutions, there is one customer expectation that is absolutely critical to meet: the solution has to work, just like you said it would, for absolute certain, all the time. Here’s the critical issue that we must never lose sight of: if we expect our customers to use and keep using our solutions then they must be absolutely reliable.

And that brings us back to thinking about sensors and tags, because when your highest aspiration is reliability you’d better build it in at the lowest level. Ubisense UWB systems are unique in measuring tag location in two different ways simultaneously: measuring the time of arrival of signals and also the angle of arrival. Two heads really are better that one: by using two different location determination methods the reliability of the data is dramatically increased. In an example application in automotive manufacturing, Ubisense achieves reliability better than six-sigma, and that’s unique in the industry.

Reliability, reliability, reliability: that’s the key to providing value, and to Ubisene's core principles and unique products.