Polycab — LoRa tracking that finds a coil before someone walks the plant.
Industrial IoT that turns "go find the material" into a query on a screen — long-range, low-power tags that survive steel, copper and a shift's worth of movement.
Naming note (publish gate): Polycab is a named enterprise client — public use of this case study needs written client permission. Until it is granted, publish the anonymised version: "a leading cable manufacturer."
Polycab (or: a leading cable manufacturer)
Live
Industrial IoT, Enterprise Systems, Web dashboard
LoRa / LoRaWAN · gateways · tag hardware · location dashboard
Industrial IoT deployment + support
On a floor this size, "go and look for it" is not cheap.
A cable plant is a big place, and the things that move through it are heavy, valuable and easy to lose in plain sight. Drums of copper, coils of finished cable, work-in-progress on pallets — all of it shifts between bays, staging areas and dispatch through a shift. When a supervisor needs a specific lot, the default method is a person walking the floor, radio in hand, asking who saw it last.
On a floor that size, "go and look for it" is not a small cost. It is minutes per search, multiplied across a shift, multiplied across the people doing the searching — and it is dispatch delays when a lot cannot be found in time.
- Heavy, high-value material moving between bays all shift
- The default locate method is a person and a radio
- Lost minutes per search compound into dispatch delays
Indoor tracking where GPS fails under steel.
Indoor industrial tracking is hard in ways that outdoor GPS is not. GPS barely works under a steel roof surrounded by metal. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth do not reach across a plant of that scale without a dense, expensive mesh, and metal reflections wreck their accuracy. Whatever we used had to cover a large area on modest power, survive an electrically noisy environment full of copper and machinery, and run on tags cheap and rugged enough to put on hundreds of moving items.
The second hard part was human: the system had to answer one plain question — "where is this material right now?" — fast enough that a supervisor trusts it more than walking the floor. If it is slow or wrong twice, people go back to the radio.
The sober engineering choice, not the fashionable one.
LoRa as the right radio for the floor
We built the tracking on LoRa (Long Range) — a low-power, long-range radio designed for exactly this: many small devices reporting across a wide area without heavy infrastructure or battery drain. LoRa penetrates an industrial environment far better than Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, covers the plant with a small number of gateways rather than a dense mesh, and lets tags run a long time between charges.
Tags, gateways and a location fabric
Material and containers carry LoRa tags. Gateways placed across the plant pick up their signals and feed a location service that resolves each tag to a zone or area. The output is not a raw data feed — it is a plain answer to "which part of the plant is this lot in," updated continuously as things move.
A dashboard a supervisor actually uses
On top sits a web dashboard that shows material by zone, lets a user search for a specific lot or container, and surfaces where it was last seen. The design goal was one glance to an answer — because the system only earns its keep if it is faster than a person walking the floor.
A rugged tag on a coil, a gateway on a wall.
Cheap, low-power hardware that survives copper, steel and a shift's worth of movement.
Locate material by looking at a screen.
The plant can now locate material by looking at a screen instead of sending someone to look. Status is Live. Because it is a real deployment in a demanding environment, the credibility is in the constraints it survives — steel, copper, scale and shift-long uptime — not in a slogan.
- Time to locate a specific lot reduced from a floor walk to a dashboard lookup — an estimated [metric] saved per search.
- Search-driven dispatch delays reduced by [metric] once location became a lookup.
- Plant coverage achieved with [metric] gateways rather than a dense Wi-Fi mesh.
Questions we get about plant tracking.
Why LoRa instead of GPS or Wi-Fi for a factory?
How accurate is LoRa material tracking?
Can this integrate with our ERP or WMS?
Can we publish this as a named case study?
Where this connects.
Sibling case studies
Maruti Suzuki — live tracking at OEM scale
Ebuzz — EV ERP + fleet tracking
Industry
Losing time hunting for material on your floor?
We build LoRa tracking that turns a floor walk into a screen lookup — sized for real plants, built to survive the environment.