From Production and Warehouse Blind Spots to Real-Time Visibility and Automation with Zebra and KINEXON

Manufacturing and logistics today is under relentless pressure to move faster, customize more, and operate with less margin for error. But, inside many production facilities, critical decisions are still made with incomplete or outdated information due to blind spots and visibility issues across different processes.

This is why our team at KINEXON set out to solve these problems by creating a better, real-time connection between the physical reality of the shop floor and the digital systems that we all use to manage production, quality, and logistics.

To move from reactive firefighting to proactive control, operations leaders, plant managers, and logistics heads need continuous, automated visibility into where materials, assets, vehicles, and orders are—right now. And, quite simply, manual scans, spreadsheets, and point-in-time updates can’t get it done when it comes to these requirements.

So, we developed a technology-agnostic software platform named KINEXON OS for identification and localization of assets that works with multiple sensor technologies to enable real-time data ingestion, event processing, and automation. It integrates and communicates with your other systems, so you can automatically track, locate, and update the status of everything moving through your operations in real time—whether it’s materials, assets, robots, or vehicles.

How to Shift from Tracking Events After the Fact to Orchestrating Flow

Traditional tracking approaches focus on individual events: a scan at goods receipt, a booking in a system, a manual confirmation at a workstation. But modern manufacturing requires something more powerful—the ability to understand and manage flow across the entire operation.

That’s where real-time location systems (RTLS) come in. By continuously capturing location, status, and movement data from across your factory, RTLS turns physical operations into a live digital representation that you can share and access with your other systems.

At KINEXON, we created a real-time location platform that enables and orchestrates those digital representations with Zebra’s RFID (radio frequency identification), UWB (ultra-wide band), BLE (Bluetooth low energy) and other location technologies. Zebra’s technologies identify, locate and track tagged materials, assets, inventory, containers, robots, vehicles, and other items as they move through your processes, and KINEXON OS platform aggregates, shares, and transmits that data in real time to your other systems.

This way, you can collect accurate and reliable real-time data on everything that’s happening in your factory, so you digitalize the physical reality and can actually see it, analyze it, and make real-time decisions based on it—using your management and execution systems.

The result is not just visibility, but control. You can use real-time locating systems to find and locate the materials and inventory when you need it, to find key assets and move them where they need to be, to know when builds and production have moved through specific stages or processes, and to commandeer your robots or vehicles for optimal material flow.

You can also use the same data to help you automate and optimize your processes, make better real-time decisions, and enable measurable performance improvements, since you can digitally monitor and analyze what’s truly happening on a factory-wide level, allowing you to uncover bottlenecks, emerging problems, and potential issues that need to be addressed.

To get a sense of how it works and how you can use a system like this, let’s start by looking at the hardware and capabilities behind KINEXON.

One Platform with Multiple Location Technologies

Manufacturing and logistics environments are complex, so no single real-time location and tracking technology is going to work everywhere, in every use case. That’s why KINEXON supports many kinds of location technologies like RFID, UWB, GPS or BLE. This offers complete flexibility to track different assets and items at different densities, frequencies, and levels accuracy, so you never have blind spots or inaccuracies.

For example, you can:

• Use fixed RFID readers from Zebra to identify and verify materials as they move through production steps.
• Use UWB tags and anchors from KINEXON RTLS Pro or other providers for high-precision tracking (down to 20 cm accuracy) of assets, tools, and work-in-process within defined indoor areas. UWB is also well suited for yard tracking and smaller outdoor spaces where high accuracy is required.
• Use BLE tracking technology from third-party providers to monitor assets across large areas, storage zones, outdoor yards, and transitional spaces. BLE is particularly beneficial in two scenarios:
  
  • For covering large facilities with high ceilings(e.g., aircraft production environments such as Airbus), as it requires less infrastructure.
  • For use cases where ultra-high precision is not required and an accuracy of approximately 3–5 meters is sufficient.

This gives you different sensors and technologies that are ideal for specific types of tracking and locating that you might need to do. All the location data they generate converges in KINEXON OS, a single software platform that creates the visibility and automation layer for your operations and connects with your enterprise systems, such as your ERP and MES (e.g. SAP Digital Manufacturing or SAP Extended Warehouse Management), to provide real-time insights across your plant. 

Five Core Use Cases to Drive Measurable Impact with Passive RFID

Use Case 1: Good Issue & Receipt – Securing Valuable Goods at Entry and Exit

When valuable goods enter or leave a facility, every movement must be accurately captured and documented. With Zebra’s identification technologies and KINEXON’s real-time localization platform, companies can reliably locate assets and automate documentation of asset movements in or out of tracked locations.

This intelligent event logic automatically streamlines the inventory count, enables better prioritization of the processing of critical goods, while automated alerts notify qualified personnel as soon as materials are received or dispatched. The result is complete transparency at goods receipt and issue points—preventing loss, reducing commissioning efforts, and ensuring high process quality through continuous monitoring.

Use Case 2: Inventory Management – Eliminating Search Times and Increasing Asset Visibility

‍Manual searches and undocumented asset movements create inefficiencies and hidden costs. By creating a digital twin of the shopfloor, Zebra and KINEXON enable companies to visualize both static areas and moving assets in real time. Once assets are moved from one warehouse location to another RFID-based event processing automatically updates object metadata, while track-and-trace functionality monitors assets moving through defined virtual geofences.

State-of-the-art visualization, combined with real-time Search & Find applications and live dashboard capabilities, eliminates non-value-adding search times, reduces manual documentation and coordination efforts caused by blind spots, and significantly enhances digitalization, transparency, and overall asset visibility.

Use Case 3: Process Flow Management – Optimizing Work-in-Progress in Production

Maintaining control over work-in-progress (WIP) assets in manufacturing environments is critical for meeting production deadlines and avoiding bottlenecks. Zebra and KINEXON provide full transparency into asset locations in real time, while seamless IT integration enables automated SAP status updates triggered by defined events.

Companies can actively manage the WIP status of every industrial asset involved in production. This enables teams to detect and resolve transportation or storage bottlenecks immediately, get alerted, when assets are exceeding dwelling times and therefore optimize asset availability, and improve order reliability—ultimately reducing costs associated with inefficient asset flows.

Use Case 4: Tool and Maintenance Tracking – Ensuring Availability and Compliance

Lost tools and unclear maintenance statuses can cause costly downtime. With real-time tracking and automated status updates, companies gain full visibility into tool locations, usage cycles, and maintenance intervals.

Alerts can be triggered when tools leave designated areas or approach required service thresholds. This ensures higher tool availability, alerting if overdue tools are used, reduction of unplanned downtime, and supports compliance with safety and maintenance standards.

Use Case 5: Lead Time Identification – Driving Continuous Process Improvement

Understanding actual lead times is essential for operational excellence. By capturing movement and process events in real time, Zebra and KINEXON enable precise measurement of dwell times, transport durations, and processing intervals. Data-driven insights reveal inefficiencies and delays across the value stream, allowing organizations to identify optimization potential, reduce throughput times, and continuously improve operational performance. 

See KINEXON and Zebra Live at LogiMAT, MODEX, and Hannover Messe 2026

To see how all of this works, you can book a demo with us, or experience it live at one of the major trade shows where we’ll be exhibiting this year:  

• ‍LogiMAT 2026 in Stuttgart, Germany (March 24 – 26)
• ‍MODEX 2026 in Atlanta, GA (April 13–16)
• Hannover Messe 2026 in Hannover, Germany (April 22–26)

KINEXON and Zebra will be on hand to demonstrate how real-time location data can automate the tracking and locating of materials, inventory, assets and vehicles. We’ll also show you how KINEXON can help you orchestrate production flow, control assembly processes, and achieve complete visibility across every area of your manufacturing and logistics.

If you’d like to see it for yourself, contact us to schedule some time to visit us at the Zebra booth or simply stop by our exhibit.