Mister Beacon

There’s been a lot of talk about the new Bluetooth Angle of Arrival (AoA) standard. This week we have a first-hand account of what it took to deploy AoA technology and how well it worked in a large scale manufacturing environment. At the Quuppa Partner Conference in Finland, we had a chance to sit down with Bob Grimm, an IT Enterprise Architect at NGK Automatics Ceramics USA, Inc. Bob had just been on stage talking about NGK’s recent deployment of Quuppa Angle of Arrival technology as part of the architecture for a real time location system (RTLS). NGK Ceramics, creators of an indispensable part for automobile catalytic converters, have massive manufacturing centers which equates to many assets and moving products that need to be accounted for. Bob described the pre-RTLS process as “finding a pallet in a sea of pallets” and the environment as exceeding production capacity that was out growing their rack based inventory control process. With the RTLS system in place, NGK immediately saw value from the inc