Volvo Group has implemented a new generation IoT tracking solution in its Trucks plant located in Blainville (in the north of France) to track and locate trucks during the production and customization process. This innovative solution has significantly improved the supply chain operationsof the factory. The solution is based on a LoRaWAN®private network deployed and managed using the ThingPark™ IoT Platform from Actility, world leader in Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN) industrial-grade connectivity solutions for the Internet of Things, and using tracking devices from Abeeway, its subsidiary specialized in low-power geolocation.
Multiplying benefitswith LoRaWAN®
Volvo Groupis one of the world’s largest truck manufacturers and includes several brands such as Volvo Trucks, Renault Trucks, UD Trucks and Mack Trucks. Its Blainville plant realized that workers were wasting hours of their time everyday looking for vehicles on the huge parking areas of the factory, having to track around 250 trucks in a plant which produces 72 vehicles and assembles over 230 cabs daily for the entire Renault Trucks and the medium duty Volvo Trucks ranges. Considering that trucks can be moved several times during the day and that the location of each truck was done manually on paper, the operations were significantly slowed down.
After testing a dozen of available solutions and devices, Volvo chose to solve this problem by placing Abeeway’s GPS Industrial Trackers inside every truck going through the assembly line. Each time a truck moves or stops, the movement is tracked, and the position is sent to Actility’s ThingPark LoRaWAN Network Serverusing LoRaWAN® , which is a global communication standard and one of the leading wireless networks technologies designed to allow long-range communication at a low data rate, reducing power and cost of transmission, and targeting key IoT requirements such as bi-directional communication, end-to-end security, mobility and localization services.
Even though the implementation of this solution has meant adding a new step to the assembly line to be able to incorporate and quickly configure the trackers, the time spent to do this is nothing compared to the time that was used before trying to find each truck, also offering a considerable cost cut, allowing to save an estimate over a hundred of thousands eurosper year only for this factory plant.
The Abeeway and Actility solution has also been chosen for being applicable to various Volvo Group factories worldwide, including plants in the United States, Belgium, Switzerland and Brazil, allowing the factory in Blainville to work as a pilot project for future deployments and fast use case enablement.
End-to-end solution with full geolocation capabilities
Leveraging LoRaWAN’s long range and low power capabilities, Abeeway allows you to efficiently locate assets and to ensure people’s safety. The devices perfectly work both outdoors and indoors thanks to their multi-technology geolocation system, and they offer the best autonomy on the market due to extremely low power consumption, allowing continuous use of the devices during years without having to worry about their maintenance. The smart Abeeway trackers are not only precise and resistant, but also durable and low-cost.
Actility offers the most powerful enterprise IoT connectivity solution: ThingPark Enterprise. The ThingPark Location platform transforms the location data into actionable information. Then using a unique APIs set, the location data can be easily integrated with third-party business applications. Volvo has implemented the PTC’s ThingWorx app, perfectly adapted to factory operations, making it extremely easy for the workers to locate each truck from mobile devices.