Manufacturing and distribution facilities – with their moving parts, fluctuating inventory, and heavy concentration of machinery and devices – are notorious for giving wireless design a run for its money.
Emphasis on money. We’ve heard about and responded to losses in the millions resulting from inadequate network designs, poor implementation, and problematic data collection devices.
But even more common – even chronic – in manufacturing and distribution facilities are coverage gaps that routinely disrupt inventory scanning and tracking, not to mention bottom lines (pen-and-paper workarounds, which warehouses turn to when wireless is down, come nowhere close to the pace achieved by data collection systems). For years, these connectivity challenges were accepted as a cost of doing business, and Velaspan was among the network engineers forced to do little more than react. Velaspan connects a notoriously hard-to-connect industryUnable to preempt or control challenging manufacturing conditions, we, like our peers, were relegated to the defensive line, diagnosing and fixing connectivity issues as they arose again and again despite our top-notch design and planning.
It got old.
Watching our clients and their networks struggle, we became laser focused getting ahead of these issues. We began testing outside-the-box strategies while borrowing proven techniques from other environments to sidestep the unique circumstances that make warehouse design so difficult.
It’s paid off.
In the last few years especially, Velaspan’s design philosophy has rapidly evolved. We’ve reworked and reassessed our approach to warehouse Wi-Fi design from the top down. The result: We’re deploying systems today that are more stable and flexible than ever. Our manufacturing and distribution warehouse clients are finally experiencing Wi-Fi as seamless and steady as what’s enjoyed by other industries. One manufacturing client put it perfectly when we checked in recently to see how their recently-deployed Wi-Fi was performing. “It’s good,” they said. “Strangely good.”
From thorough onsite coverage assessments and wireless site surveys (yes, even in the age of COVID) to newer strategies and next-generation hardware, things have progressed a lot for this industry in the past few years. Still, high-performance Wi-Fi in manufacturing and distribution comes down to the perfect interplay of hardware selection, physical design, and operational strategy – designed and deployed to exacting specifications, keeping your unique business requirements in mind. There’s no algorithm. No off-the-shelf solution. Put simply, there’s still nothing turnkey about manufacturing wireless design today. But with Velaspan, nothing about it is lacking, either.
Ready to take your manufacturing or distribution facility’s wireless design to the next level? Contact Velaspan today to schedule a consultation and learn more about our innovative approach.
