AutoID & Data Capture Blog

5G Edge Infrastructure Market Growing Rapidly Ahead of Standardization

Reposition RTLS … in Real-time

This is a call to all Real Time Location Systems (RTLS) solution providers … You’re markets don’t fully understand your solutions and their value.  Based on our recently completed global survey of 350 enterprises, the vast majority of enterprises using or planning to use RTLS systems have:

  • Limited knowledge of what RTLS is and what it can do – beyond what they are using it for now
  • Routinely confused the technology with other solutions (i.e.: asset tracking, time/attendance)
  • Misperceptions on the benefits and value RTLS can add to their enterprise AND value chain
  • Challenges justifying investment

Simply stated, most deploying enterprises perceive RTLS as a vertically-centric tracking solution that provides continual and automatic data streams on an object(s) and its environment(s).  With the exception of the health care market (which is typically more advanced than other verticals and has been cultivated aggressively for years), when these users are thinking of solution expansion, they are primarily thinking of tagging more objects (scale), as opposed to true expansion of the RTLS platform to be leveraged for other applications (i.e.: compliance), operations and value chains beyond track/trace and location based services.   

We believe the market needs to better understand the technology, its capabilities, limitations, value propositions, etc., before broader adoption can occur.  The ability of suppliers to grow their accounts will be largely tied to their individual and collective abilities to educate the market on RTLS.   RTLS providers need to reposition their messaging on RTLS as more than just another track and trace solution - continued market development hinges on it.