Mivor relies on IoT RTLS technology from Ubiquicom to understand productions costs and increase productivity in an apple packing plant
The Mivor case: IoT – RTLS applied to cost accounting
The Ubiquicom solution makes it possible to monitor the time spent by Mivor staff on every production line, facilitating the sharing of operating costs
Milan, 24 January 2022 – Automatically obtain accurate information in real-time relating to the number of people on a production line and their position to improve the apple processing speed and determine the contract cost on the basis of real operating costs. This is the challenge that Mivor, one of the leading cooperatives in Italy for storing, selecting and packing apples produced in Val Venosta in South Tyrol laid down to Ubiquicom to establish themselves firmly as a 4.0 company.
Mivor was looking for a solution to automatically manage cost sharing of staff between the different production and product lines in compliance with regulations on privacy and employee monitoring. The necessary output had to be a report with the total minutes and seconds spent by staff at each work station along every production line.
Ubiquicom, an Italian company specialised in RTLS – Real-Time Locating System solutions for real-time tracking and locating proposed and implemented an Ultra-Wideband (UWB) based solution, which makes it possible to locate every person working in the plant in real-time with 2 updates per second and with a margin of error of less than one metre.
Using the Ubiquicom Locator platform working positions along the line were drawn up by defining the reference area for each work station. The areas involved in the project were equipped with 27 UWB anchors connected and powered via Ethernet cables. All employees were given keyrings with a UWB tag and a passive RFID tag that are already used for access control.
The reports produced by the software are anonymous and only provide a total time count for each line without tracing the positions of individual employees, in full compliance with regulations on workers’ rights and protection.
Ubiquicom, alongside the Mivor management directly followed the project starting with defining the requirements right up to assembling the devices and implementation.
The positions recorded reflect operations and can be used not only to obtain the required reports but also to change the speed of the line automatically on the basis of the number of people interfacing the system with the PLC on the line.
“UWB technology allows for anonymous localisation of employees: I know there is a person in a certain position but I don’t know who they are, in full compliance with privacy laws” explained Stefano Sarasso, CEO of Ubiquicom. “At the end of the day Mivor can get a report with a cumulative head count for every area as well as a real-time head count of the number of people on every line and the number of people present in the entire plant. This way it is possible to automate and further improve the apple processing speed that to maintain their proverbial quality must leave the factory as quickly as possible to get to distribution.”
“With the RTLS solution designed for us by Ubiquicom we have been able to get accurate, reliable information in real-time for the first time on the number of people on each line and their position” Kurt Wellenzohn, CTO of Mivor pointed out. “All of this in a completely automatic way. Thanks to this information new possibilities have opened up for us at MIVOR to manage and optimise our processes, reduce costs and improve the final results for our clients.”