[ INSIGHT ] VISIBILITY
by Viren Mathuria CEO, LocaXion vmathuria@locaxion.com | 720-290-1113
Supply Chains Go Dark at the Dock Door Two decades of visibility spending have run outward and upstream: control towers, ETAs, port dwell, carrier scorecards. The farther the freight sits from the building, the more precisely it is watched.
posting clean transactions into the WMS or yard system. That work rarely tops a hardware maker’s roadmap. No single radio covers a full building economically, either. A hardware-agnostic middleware, open interfaces, and facility-specific rule sets keep the capability in your hands while the hardware underneath it churns. Before pricing hardware, price the darkness. Pull 90 days of cycle-count adjustments, lost-load searches, detention charges, and dock-to-stock variance, and cost the hours plainly; the figure usually outweighs the pilot it would justify. Fund that baseline as the project’s first phase rather than demanding it as a precondition. The chicken-and-egg standoff between operations, which cannot promise savings it has never measured, and finance, which will not fund what no one will promise, ends the moment evidence exists. The takeaways: Measure the searching before buying the finding; fund the baseline first; keep rules, master data, and interfaces vendor-neutral so the capability outlasts any tag; pilot one dock, receiving through put-away, and track search hours returned to work, and minutes to locate anything on demand. The pallet turned up after lunch, two aisles from where its scan said it lived— visible across 10,000 miles of ocean and road—gone in the last 200 feet. That stretch deserves the same standard of proof as the rest.
though, are the smaller half of the value. Paired with a live model of the facility enabled by digital twin
Inside the four walls, the system of record still runs on scans, and a scan of records intent, including where something was supposed to go, keyed by a person, whenever they got to it. Between scans the building’s logs are non- existent, which is why cycle counting exists as a permanent program. Paid labor rediscovers, week after week, what the operation once knew and mislaid. WHY DOES THIS GAP PERSIST? For many, location technology still carries the baggage of 15-year-old RFID pilots: portal installs, read-rate debates, and their consequently abandoned trials. But judging modern real-time location systems (RTLS) by that history misses the point entirely. RTLS is not a secondary feature of a warehouse project; rather it’s the foundation for turning movement inside the facility into reliable operational intelligence. Today’s RTLS produces continuous coordinates for AGVs/trucks, pallets, and workers, accurate to a meter from whatever mix of ultra-wideband, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and vision technologies a building justifies. The coordinates,
technology—which polygon is which bay, what movements amount to a put- away, how long a vehicle may sit idle before it matters—position starts closing transactions instead of simply showing up on fancy dashboards. Across many sites, pallets most often disappear in the brief gap between a forklift setting down a load and someone entering the bay location, which could be frustrating. If the put-away transaction confirms itself, using the trailer the load came from and the forklift position at the moment of transfer would trigger an error and eliminate searches at the source itself. Dock-to-stock time, once inferred from scan timestamps often entered in batches, becomes a measurable distribution with a clear outlier tail. Vehicle dwell also becomes visible while still avoiding detention time. One caution: The locating hardware carries 20% to 40% of the outcome. The rest is the rule set converting coordinates into events plus the master data naming every bay and zone, and the integration
October 2026 • Inbound Logistics 27
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