Rtls Potential For Changes In The Tooling Industry Business Model Towards Smart Factory

Digitization is a fundamental condition for the establishment of smart systems, including production and intralogistics. Today, several years after introducing the Industry 4.0 concept, we can observe that the penetration of enabling technologies depends on the type of industry. For example, we notice that the craft industries, for example, toolmaking, whose work is based on the engineer-to-order concept, are lagging. There is pressure to change the traditional business model. In this paper, we develop the concept of capturing production data with minimal employee involvement. The production environment of toolmaking is usually still based on manual data entry and ongoing decision-making on the distribution of workpieces between machines according to the current situation. Laboratory testing justifies the introduction of Real-time Location System (RTLS) technology as a technology that captures real-time location data on the monitored items. The captured location data can trigger activities in other software solutions and free up employees of administrative work. In conjunction with the MES system, we can obtain sufficiently accurate data for more in-deep technological preparation of production as a prerequisite for more advanced planning and scheduling tasks among machines. Most importantly, this technology supports a change in the business model.