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Although mobility has forever altered our work and personal lives, for many businesses the true promise of Wi-Fi goes beyond mobilizing their employees to also assisting with managing their physical assets. This is particularly the case in industries where hundreds, or even thousands, of critical assets move around a location on any given day.

In healthcare alone, where items such as IV pumps, heart defibrillators, and even wheelchairs are easily misplaced, a McKinsey study estimated 25 percent of a hospital staff’s time is spent looking for such assets.[i] It’s a similar story in other asset-rich industries, like retail and warehousing or manufacturing. There, delays in locating items, or lags in production, mean wasted time for employees, delayed fulfillment for customers and, often, lost revenues.

All told, enterprises worldwide lose millions of dollars every year on high-value items and inventory that is misplaced, lost or stolen. However, in the past, adopting an asset management solution to address this challenge often added complexities and strained budgets.

Aruba Asset Tracking to the Rescue

Now, there’s a better way. In addition to providing high-performance Wi-Fi, your existing Aruba WLAN can double as a Bluetooth sensory network with our new, intuitive Aruba asset tracking solution.

By placing Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)-enabled Aruba Tags on your valued items, you can locate them within minutes, using a mobile app that you can easily create with Aruba Meridian AppMaker. Or, if you already have an app or asset management solution, you can integrate information about the location of these assets into your existing tool by Meridian’s mobile software development kit (SDK) – for iOS and Android – or cloud service application programming interfaces (APIs).

Designed for quick deployment, you can be up and running in minutes. Designate assets using names, photos and optional IDs to enable quick searches. Then, leverage Meridian to find assets across multiple geo-locations, buildings and floors – without requiring staff to visit the site physically. When staff is onsite, they can also get turn-by-turn directions to the specific location of an asset, significantly improving staff productivity.

From their very first day on the job, an employee standing on the 5^th floor of your building can search for a term like “wheelchair,” filter results by floor and view the locations of all units. If “Room 22” is the closest, the app can guide the employee to the asset.

What’s more, making changes or updates to asset information is fast and easy. Revisions can be performed at an asset’s location, with all data automatically saved in Meridian’s central cloud database.

Evolving with Your Business

As your asset tracking requirements evolve, we’ve paved the way for implementing a more advanced solution by extending our asset tracking ecosystem to include existing technology partners, like STANLEY Healthcare, Emerge Interactive, Raizlabs and VenueNext. Moving forward, we’ll continue to pursue partnerships in various industry verticals to address emerging needs.

By leveraging such relationships, your developers can integrate the context available in Aruba’s solution with the information received from a wide range of real-time asset tracking technologies, like ultra-wideband (UWB), near field communication (NFC), radio frequency identification (RFID). This can offer comprehensive analytics and visibility across a variety of asset tracking scenarios.

Vantage Mobility: Piloting Smarter Operations

To see how Aruba asset tracking is revolutionizing enterprises, look no further than Vantage Mobility International (VMI). The pioneering manufacturer of wheelchair accessible vans purchases every make and model of a van from car companies and turns them into customized transportation solutions for the disability community.

With up to 2,000 vehicles on its multi-acre production, storage and sales premises at any given time, VMI performs a 48-stage conversion process on each vehicle.

Previously, tracking vehicles by make, model and VIN number was manual and spreadsheet-driven, lacking an effective means to capture or extract data for analytics or process improvement. And finding a specific minivan among an acre of others meeting the same description? It was inefficient at best.

With Aruba asset tracking that’s all changing. Not only can any vehicle be precisely located in seconds, VMI is also establishing a next-generation smart manufacturing system by integrating asset tracking with its production processes and ERP system.

As a result, VMI will gain dynamic analytics data for streamlining production, the visibility to provide customers with highly accurate completion projections and, ultimately, the ability to accelerate delivery of life-changing transportation.

Don’t Worry. Keep Moving.

No matter what types of assets your business depends on, you can combine your Aruba Wi-Fi with the new asset tracking solution to ensure your critical assets are where you need them, when you need them, while simultaneously reducing or eliminating costs associated with loss or theft.

With so many opportunities to improve efficiency, enhance customer experiences and boost your bottom line, what do you have to lose?

No matter what types of high-value physical assets your business depends on, you can combine your Aruba WLAN infrastructure – powering a Bluetooth sensory network – with our new asset tracking solution to ensure your items are where you need them when you need them. Letting us keep track of your assets ensures your business can keep moving.

With so many opportunities to improve efficiency and boost your bottom line, what do you have to lose?

To learn more about how you can take advantage of the Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, Asset Tracking solution, access all the details by visiting http://www.arubanetworks.com/products/mobile-engagement/aruba-tags/

[1] McKinsey, Strength in Unity: The Promise of Global Standards in Healthcare, October 2012