Beer Maker Boosts Warehouse Operations with Forklift

Forklifts, Warehousing, Technology Budweiser Budvar Brewery increased warehouse utilization 19% by replacing RFID-powered forklift tracking with SEWIO RTLS.The ChallengeThe Budweiser Budvar Brewery leveraged Sewio real-time location system (RTLS) to improve warehouse utilization, decrease maintenance costs and get additional insights into their logistics operations.The Budweiser Budvar Brewery was using a passive RFID solution to minimize human error while operating 20,000+ 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%.In order to retain the process of minimizing human errors in logistics but crucially lower the maintenance costs and increase the system uptime, Budweiser Budvar decided to replace the RFID-built system with Sewio UWB RTLS for indoor tracking using Decawave chip. The SolutionWith the newly implemented system the reliability of the system itself has resulted in 99% of system uptime. The newly acquired insights such as daily attendance, distance traveled and utilization of each forklift, together with heatmaps and spaghetti diagrams, have allowed logistics managers in Budweiser to better utilize the current warehouse, virtually growing it by 19%.“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,” said 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.“At Decawave our goal is to make micro-location technology available to the masses by providing chips with state of the art performance at an affordable price. We are delighted to see partners like Sewio embrace the same philosophy and deliver RTLS systems that are cost competitive while delivering superior performance and capabilities to end customers,” said Mickael Viot VP Marketing at Decawave.For further information, read the full case study here: www.sewio.net/customer-projects/budweiser-budvar.To learn more about Sewio solutions, visit www.sewio.net.