RTLS case studies – Real-time asset tracking systems
RTLS use cases – From oil & gas facilities in Singapore, marine repairs in the UAE, to automotive plants in India — case studies on how leading organisations use 0-wire RTLS to solve real operational problems.
What Are RTLS Use Cases?
A use case is a specific operational problem that a Real-Time Location System solves. The same BLE RTLS platform can address very different challenges depending on the industry and environment — from tracking a marine pump through seven repair stages, to monitoring temperature around a CNC machine, to knowing where every pallet is in a 10,000 sq metre warehouse.
The four deployments below represent real use cases across four industries — each solved with the same 0-wire RipplesIPS platform, deployed without cabling in under a week.
[SLB] 🔧 Oil & Gas | Marine Pump Repair Facility SLB (Schlumberger)
Tracked high-value marine pumps through seven repair stages — Intake to Dispatch — without a single barcode scan. Supervisors gained real-time WIP visibility across the entire repair floor within one week of deployment—solution: Work-in-Progress RTLS tracking. In a marine pump repair facility, every pump is a high-value work order moving through a defined repair cycle — Intake, Disassembly, Inspection, Parts Procurement, Repair, Testing, and Dispatch. Before RipplesIPS, supervisors relied on manual job cards and verbal updates to track each pump’s status in the process.
SLB deployed RipplesIPS across their repair floor with BLE tags attached to each pump on arrival. As pumps moved between repair bays, zone transitions were logged automatically on the dashboard — no scanning, no manual entry. Dwell-time rules flagged any pump that exceeded its expected time at a given stage, giving supervisors an early warning of bottlenecks before they became delays.
What changed:
- Full WIP visibility across all seven repair stages from a single dashboard
- Bottlenecks at Inspection and Parts Procurement were identified within the first week
- Zero-wire deployment — live across the full repair floor in under seven days
Every repair bay is a zone. Every pump is a tracked work order. RipplesIPS gives operations managers the same real-time control over a service facility that manufacturers have on a production line. See how WIP tracking works →
[ZF Gears] 🌡️ Automotive Manufacturing | Critical Equipment Monitoring ZF Gears
Deployed wireless temperature sensors around critical production equipment to replace manual spot-checks. Real-time threshold alerts and continuous data logging now feed the engineering team’s preventive maintenance workflow. In precision component manufacturing, temperature deviations around critical equipment are not just a compliance concern — they directly affect part tolerances and product quality. ZF Gears deployed Ripples IoT wireless temperature sensors around critical production equipment to replace manual spot-checks with always-on monitoring.
Battery-powered BLE sensors were placed on and around target equipment with zero cabling, going live in under four hours per zone. The Bluetooth mesh network self-healed around metal machinery interference, maintaining reliable data transmission across the shopfloor.
What changed:
- Real-time threshold alerts are sent directly to the engineering team the moment readings deviate
- Continuous data logging replaced periodic manual checks, creating an unbroken audit trail
- Preventive maintenance schedules are now triggered by actual thermal data, not estimated intervals
Temperature is an invisible variable with very visible consequences in precision manufacturing. RipplesIPS makes it permanently visible. Solution: Remote temperature & cold chain monitoring See how temperature monitoring works →
[Henkel] 👷 Adhesives Manufacturing | Factory Worker Tracking Henkel
Equipped factory workers with BLE wearable tags across production, packaging, and dispatch zones. Zone-level presence, restricted area alerts, and time-in-zone analytics — all live on a single dashboard. Solution: Connected worker tracking. Across a large adhesives manufacturing facility, keeping an accurate track of workers across production, packaging, and dispatch zones is essential for both safety compliance and operational efficiency. Henkel deployed RipplesIPS connected worker tracking, equipping factory workers with lightweight BLE wearable tags reporting location in real time to a central dashboard.
Anchors were deployed without any infrastructure wiring, and the system was live within days. Zone-level presence data, restricted area alerts, and time-in-zone analytics all fed into a single operational view for supervisors and safety officers.
What changed:
- Live zone-level visibility of all workers across the facility at all times
- Automated alerts when workers enter hazardous or restricted zones without authorisation
- Time-in-zone analytics surfaced productivity patterns and supported smarter shift planning
- Compliance reports are generated automatically, reducing the administrative load on safety teams
The same platform that tracks pallets and inventory tracks your people — giving factory managers a unified view of everything that moves on the floor. See how worker tracking works →
[NUS] 📦 Research Institution | Warehouse Pallet Tracking PoC National University of Singapore (NUS)
Evaluated RipplesIPS for pallet location tracking and automated cycle counting across a research storage facility. Sub-meter accuracy confirmed, deployed in under four hours, no cabling required. Solution: Warehouse pallet tracking. NUS evaluated RipplesIPS as part of a structured proof-of-concept to assess accuracy, ease of deployment, and suitability for research and storage environments — without committing to a full-scale rollout. The Industrial RTLS Starter Kit was used, covering pallet location tracking, zone-based inventory visibility, and automated cycle counting across a defined storage area.
The kit was operational in under four hours with no cabling or IT infrastructure changes. The evaluation confirmed that the solution performs reliably in environments with dense shelving and storage racking — conditions that challenge many RTLS technologies.
Evaluation outcomes:
- Sub-meter location accuracy validated across the full test area, including racked storage
- Cycle counting is automated, with pallet positions updated in real time on the RipplesIPS dashboard
- Solution confirmed suitable for research storage environments where asset location and access control matter, alongside inventory accuracy
Not every deployment starts at full scale — and it shouldn’t have to. The RipplesIPS Starter Kit is designed exactly for evaluations like this: low commitment, fast to deploy, and directly scalable to full enterprise rollout using the same hardware and software. See how warehouse tracking works →
More RTLS Use Cases Across Industries
RipplesIPS is deployed across a wider set of use cases beyond the four above. Each links to a dedicated solution page:
- Warehouse pallet tracking & FIFO automation — real-time inventory visibility across high-density storage
- Logistics yard management — trailer dwell time, truck TAT, dock scheduling
- Hospital pharmacy workflow & OT monitoring — patient wait times, surgical asset tracking
- Lone worker safety & connected worker tracking — panic button, fall detection, zone breach alerts
- Cold chain monitoring — temperature and humidity across warehouses, labs, and transit
- Production shop floor & WIP tracking — zone-to-zone movement, dwell-based task completion
- Building demolition & construction safety — worker headcount, evacuation, zone mapping
Not sure which use case fits your operation? The Industrial RTLS Starter Kit lets you validate any use case in under a week for US$1,000 — same hardware and software as a full enterprise deployment.
Every operational case study on this page started with a single question: how do we get visibility without a costly infrastructure project? If you’re asking the same question, let’s talk. Start with our Industrial RTLS Starter Kit — live in under a week, from US$1,000. Talk to us →