Item Locator System Item Locator is a unique patented system for assisting staff to quickly locate items inside a large single building space such as a warehouse or factory, or over a wide open area such as a storage yard or a construction site. Item Locator is particularly suited to instantly finding objects in difficult environments where there are many similar looking items in close proximity, or where the search area is large. Item Locator is scaleable and so may be used to tag anything from a handful up to thousands of items, which can each then be instantly located within a square kilometre area. The system has been designed to focus solely on the items being sought at any one time and so is optimised to find between one to ten items in any single search. The items in questions may be anything such as high value assets, components, plant, mobile equipment, pallets of goods or even people etc. The items are tagged in advance and when sought the associated tag is woken up by a radio signal. The tag position is ascertained and the tag emits a loud beeping noise and flashing light so it will be quickly located by searching staff.
The Item Locator System can be installed as the primary means of finding items or as a secondary back-up method if the formal systems fail. An example application is where key parts are required quickly for mission critical maintenance, but they are stored in brown cardboard boxes with hundreds of other similar boxes stacked on pallets across many warehouse racks. The warehouse system in theory provides the formal location of where such an item ‘should be’, but if it has been put away incorrectly, moved or misplaced it could take hours or even days to find it through a manual search of all the racking. By contrast the Item Locator system helps staff find the required items within minutes.
Traditional RFID systems do not perform this task very well without a significant multiple reader implementation across the whole site which is expensive, inflexible and time consuming. For large area coverage a traditional RFID system could take weeks of planning, configuration, implementation and tuning effort. By contrast our Item Locator system is quick, easy and cheap to implement as it only requires one transmitter to be installed in the centre of the site or building which can cover a large area up to one kilometre square. Our Item Locator system is the closest to ‘plug and go’ as is possible for an RFID system to be and can be installed and delivering value in under an hour.