Aug 18, 2015 Stanley Black & Decker is discontinuing its AeroScout Industrial line of real-time location systems (RTLS) products for manufacturing, transportation and logistics, effective Nov. 1. The company announced the closure on its AeroScout website earlier this month, but noted that its Stanley Healthcare division will continue to offer AeroScout solutions to hospitals and other health-care providers. AeroScout's RTLS uses battery-powered RFID tags that transmit unique IDs via the Wi-Fi protocol. The announcement comes three years after Stanley Black and Decker acquired AeroScout (see Stanley Healthcare Solutions Acquires Wi-Fi-based RTLS Company AeroScout).
Stanley Black & Decker says that industrial AeroScout products will not be available for purchase after Oct. 31, and installation support will not be available for new orders. The company says it will not renew any agreements relating to AeroScout Industrial products or services, but will fulfill warranty obligations for products sold before Nov. 1. Maintenance services will continue to be provided until maintenance contracts expire. In a public statement, Stanley Healthcare indicated that "the AeroScout brand is alive and well and remains a key technology foundation" for Stanley Healthcare's RTLS solutions. "We continue to innovate and extend the capabilities of these solutions," the statement reads. "All Stanley Healthcare customers using AeroScout products may rest assured that there is: no change to solutions or support; no change in leadership or structure; no change in business resources; no change in strategic direction."
Stanley Black and Decker and Stanley Healthcare declined to comment for this story. Therefore it's unclear whether existing industrial customers could use products sold by Stanley Healthcare. However, two vendors of competing Wi-Fi-based RTLS solutions say that their Wi-Fi-based RFID tags could be used by AeroScout Industrial customers. Zebra Technologies, says its WhereNet Wi-Fi-based RTLS tags would work with AeroScout solutions. Wi-Fi RTLS company Ekahau indicated its tags have also been used with AeroScout solutions, although that is not a combination Ekahau recommends, since Ekahau's regular upgrades would not be available with an AeroScout system.
In the past, AeroScout offered Wi-Fi based RTLS solutions, predominantly for the health-care sector, but also for customers in other sectors. When Stanley Black & Decker acquired AeroScout in 2012, Stanley Healthcare took over the management, marketing and development of the AeroScout health-care products, while Stanley Black & Decker's industrial group took control of AeroScout's industrial business.
Stanley Black & Decker's decision to discontinue its AeroScout Industrial product line may be an indication of challenges for the RTLS market in this sector. While health-care providers continue to acquire RTLS systems to track personnel, patients and high-value and critical assets (such as life-saving equipment and crash carts) to ensure they can find something or someone quickly, the industrial sector does not necessarily have the same needs, says Patrick Connolly, an ABI Research principal analyst.
RTLS solutions that employ Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons are muscling into the industrial market for tracking assets, since a beacon-based solution can be deployed at lower cost. Like Wi-Fi RTLS tags, a battery-powered beacon transmits a unique ID. Users simply acquire and attach beacons to assets, and employ smart phones and tablets to receive the beacon's transmission. Most industrial asset-tracking application users do not require location-based data to be as precise as do users of health-care asset-tracking applications. Therefore the return on investment for a Wi-Fi-based RTLS system is considerably longer than it would be in a hospital, he points out.
Connolly says he has been told by large industrial companies that they are acquiring or have acquired hundreds of thousands of Bluetooth beacons for tracking of assets. So although there is a market for Wi-Fi-based RTLS in industrial deployments in which precise location is important, many other manufacturing or other industrial companies can accomplish what they need with the low-cost BLE alternative.
Zebra offers RTLS solutions for the industrial sector, and it has seen 100 percent increase in orders by industrial customers over the past year, says Jill Stelfox, the company's VP and general manager for location solutions. That's in part, she says, because Zebra offers beacon-based technology as well as hybrid solutions that combine passive UHF RFID and active Wi-Fi technologies, depending on the needs of the company's customers. More than 50 percent of its industrial customers, she says, are using a hybrid active and passive solution, or a beacon-based system.
"The fact is, there is a myriad of technologies that can be used to solve a problem," she says. "One thing that distinguishes Zebra is that we have all those technologies," that can be offered to customers as needed.
For instance, she says, a company might want a yard-management solution consisting of a passive UHF RFID reader at its gates to monitor who enters or leaves its property, but within its yard, an RTLS system with precise location data might be necessary. By blending the two technologies (passive UHF RFID and active Wi-Fi), the company can save money.
When it comes to beacons, Stelfox says she's seen significant interest from industrial users. "Not only do we manufacture beacons but also mobile devices that can read beacons," she says. The low-cost beacons could be deployed around a facility, and staff could use Zebra's Android-based MC40 touch computer to read beacon data as well as to scan barcodes or view picking orders.
"For us it's a real advantage that we focus on the use case. We've got our MotionWorks software," she adds, and the technology being used to feed data to that software can be flexible. "The end user doesn't even have to know if it's active, passive or beacon," she says. "Zebra is very committed to the industrial space and will remain so."
AeroScout's RTLS system requires more infrastructure installation than an RTLS system such as Ekahau's, says Emily Nardone, Ekahau's product marketing director. The AeroScout solution includes the option of installing exciters around a facility to wake up an active tag and prompt the tag to start transmitting its own ID and that of the exciter. By using AeroScout exciters in conjunction with AeroScout tags, a health-care or industrial user can locate assets and personnel more precisely. However, an AeroScout RTLS deployment does not require the installation of exciters in order to operate.
Ekahau, Nardone says, has patented a solution in which active tags transmit their Wi-Fi signal directly to the Wi-Fi access points, thereby sparing users from having to deploy exciters. Exciters, she says, are not always easy to install in a large open space with high ceilings, such as those found in the industrial sector. However, Ekahau tags do require an enterprise-grade mobile Wi-Fi infrastructure, which many companies don't have.
Nardone says the majority of Ekahau's RTLS deployments are still in the health-care market, although as users' Wi-Fi networks become more robust, Ekahau tags are also being deployed by industrial companies and retailers and, increasingly by schools. She adds that industrial companies have come to Ekahau saying they had opted against the AeroScout solution because of the need for the installation of exciters. In that case, they often choose to upgrade their Wi-Fi network and then acquire the Ekahau solution. At that point, the installation is simple, she says. "It's just a matter of here are your tags, activate them and go."
Raghu Das, the CEO of U.K.-based analyst firm IDTechEx, says the industrial sector represents a very small percentage of the overall RTLS market, but he expects further growth. "Enterprise is interested if RTLS addresses a problem at a price point where it provides a good payback versus other ways of fixing that problem," he says. "As with most types of RFID, it has been a case of building a solution and then trying many things until strong use cases are found which then enables faster deployment of systems."
