Imagine managing a food or beverage manufacturing operation with complete, real-time visibility into all the raw food products, bulk ingredients, chemicals, additives, and other assets and materials in your supply chain that need to be received, staged, and moved through.
Now imagine you can also get the same level of visibility into all the inventory, pallets, tooling, equipment, or other assets that are critical to your entire operation?
That’s the idea behind Zebra’s MotionWorks technology, which we’ve introduced in some of our earlier blogs. MotionWorks provides real-time asset tracking and location solutions to help today’s manufacturers better manage their operations and make smarter decisions involving all the goods and assets required for production.
What’s impressive about the technology is its flexibility to automate workflows and provide real-time visibility across an array of processes and throughout an entire operation. You can use it to track materials, parts, or goods for production and replenishment requirements, and you can also use it to track finished goods inventory, equipment, tooling, and virtually any high-value asset in your warehouse or other areas of your manufacturing environment.
Wherever you use the technology, the same core principles and solutions apply. MotionWorks uses intelligent tracking, sensing, and locating to capture data on any critical assets you need to manage.
It identifies where your assets are, their status, and whether they’re on the move. It gathers this data and uses intelligent algorithms to convert it into dashboard-level views, reports, and alerts that help you manage those assets live and in real time. You can also integrate this location, status, and movement data into ERP systems and other applications, so you can automate key workflows and processes, such as work-in-process tracking, receiving, replenishment, and more.
For example, using MotionWorks Material, you can easily manage any type of material flow of goods and assets required for production, such as raw fruits, grains, vegetables, meats, and dairy products in food production. It can also be used to track bulk goods such as ingredients, additives, chemicals, liquids, and other items needed for beverage manufacturing.
Ultimately, the end game is simple yet powerful. MotionWorks Material gives material handlers and other members of the supply chain access to actionable, real-time insights on inventory, demand, replenishment, and production requirements—all from the factory floor.
With this immediate visibility, workers can focus on delivering necessary goods or assets on time and more efficiently, without unnecessary movement or uncertainty. You can also configure inventory, replenishment, processing, and production triggers using Zebra’s software together with tracking, locating, and sensing technologies; Zebra mobile computing devices; and your ERP or other systems you use to manage your operations.
This opens up numerous possibilities, such as opportunities to use the resulting triggers, data, and insights to automate, streamline, and improve many related processes. You can replace manual and paper-based processes with automated and more accurate workflows, eliminate extra steps and bottlenecks in your supply chain, increase the number of goods and products that can be processed, reduce time to replenish, and much more.
It all starts with some basic technological building blocks that Zebra provides along with its groundbreaking MotionWorks software, which has helped Zebra earn recognition in Gartner’s Global Magic Quadrant for indoor location services.
You can also find out more about MotionWorks, how real-time location solutions work, and whether they’re a fit for your business by reaching out to us at AbeTech.
As a certified Zebra technology partner, we’ve worked closely with Zebra on automation, visibility, and location tracking solutions for many of our manufacturing clients. Our experts can help you quickly get up to speed on the latest real-time location and data capture technologies and how they’re being used in production operations. We’ll help you evaluate whether these same solutions can be applied to your processes, so you can achieve better visibility and efficiency in your manufacturing environment.
