Whitepapers

COMPLEMENTARY TECHNOLOGIES: LoRaWAN ® & BLUETOOTH www.lora-alliance.org 4 MACHINEQ SOLUTION COMPONENTS MachineQ Leverages LoRaWAN and BLE for Real-Time Asset Tracking SITUATION: A global pharmaceutical biotech company needed to track high-value, portable lab assets in real-time across a campus spanning 1,000+ labs and 850,000 square feet. PROBLEM: Despite having an inventory record-keeping process in place, the company struggled with tracking assets in real-time and began looking for a solution to augment and enhance their existing process. The customer explored an RFID solution because the technology is ubiquitous, has low tag cost and ultra-thin form factor, and is easy to deploy. However, the company discovered that an RFID solution wasn't ideal for their use case because it could only provide room-level accuracy and they wanted to track assets with greater precision. Plus, the trade-off— low tag costs for high OPEX costs to manage an RFID solution—made it the wrong option for their needs. SOLUTION: Working with MachineQ, a Comcast Company, the customer implemented MachineQ for Asset Management, an IoT-enabled asset tracking solution that combines BLE and LoRaWAN technologies to provide precise, real-time visibility into the location of assets at a fraction of the cost of RFID solutions. The solution included: • UL-certified hardware components - BLE Location Bridges that support sophisticated edge processing, reducing latency and bandwidth use and improving location accuracy Asset tags with custom- designed hardware and firmware enabling a 10-year battery-life - LoRaWAN gateways offering long range data transmission • A dedicated and secure network infrastructure that's independent of the corporate internet network • A progressive web application for visualization on web and mobile and APIs for third-party platform integration • Professional installation and continued support provided by Comcast Business technicians BUSINESS IMPACT: Thanks to a rapid deployment, low startup costs, and low total cost of ownership, the company expects to realize ROI by: • Reducing annual asset repurchasing costs, enabling finance to redirect and optimize the use of working capital • Creating more efficient processes by integrating with their ERP, which allows other departments to reuse the same location data for cost allocations, inventory management, asset management and maintenance, and compliance tracking • Eliminating costly maintenance contracts on lost and decommissioned assets • Increasing lab staff productivity by saving time spent searching for assets • Expanding upon the LoRaWAN network infrastructure and looking to add more use cases, such as leak detection, temperature monitoring, occupancy monitoring, and predictive maintenance. By complementing BLE with LoRaWAN, this real- time asset tracking solution was able to hone in on the precise location of an asset, within a room.

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