How Bluetooth® technology is shedding light on visibility gaps across industrial and supply chain operations
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Historically, wireless communication has not been an ideal option for industrial environments. Metal objects and similar materials have limited line-of-sight transmission between assets, sensors, and gateways. However, Bluetooth is changing that.
By tracking critical assets in challenging environments, Bluetooth® technology helps facility managers gain valuable insight into day-to-day operations, supporting the implementation of optimized processes that allow them to deliver more while using less.
“Bluetooth® technology ensures reliable performance and meets the demanding requirements for large-scale deployments in challenging environments,” said Peter Karlsson, senior director of technology at u-blox.
Enhancing visibility drives proactive strategies
Bluetooth® technology powers real-time visibility across factories and supply chains to provide instant insight into inventory, movement, and status, supporting smarter decision making and creating efficiencies that ripple through an operation. This awareness enables teams to move from reactive decisions to proactive processes.
“By giving each asset a digital identity and trackable presence, companies can better understand how these resources move through the supply chain,” said Amir Khoshniyati, vice president at Wiliot. “With reliable, automated visibility, companies gain greater confidence that goods are moving as expected while reducing operational friction along the way.”
When every asset communicates its location and condition, supply chains move from fragmented visibility to a continuously updated digital picture of operations, providing insight into:
- Real-time asset location and flow patterns across facilities and transportation networks
- Dwell time analysis to identify bottlenecks or inefficiencies
- Inventory accuracy and availability without manual counts
- Utilization of reusable assets like containers and pallets
- Predictive alerts when shipments deviate from expected routes or timelines
This level of greater visibility allows companies to optimize inventory, improve service reliability, and make faster, data-driven operational decisions.
“Positioning capabilities based on Bluetooth® Direction Finding and/or Bluetooth® Channel Sounding are excellent in combination with global navigation satellite system (GNSS) technology to maintain asset tracking and monitoring throughout the industrial supply chain,” said Peter Karlsson from u-blox. “Bluetooth® modules simplify the design of devices used as sensors and tags for monitoring and tracking in factories and warehouses. These modules also provide accurate direction and distance estimations for tracking and logistics.”
High-accuracy Bluetooth positioning helps operations managers to better understand the movement of assets, materials, and personnel within complex industrial environments. When every asset uses Bluetooth connectivity to continuously communicate its location and condition, industrial facilities and supply chain operations can gain valuable insight into daily processes.
Bluetooth® tracking tags can help organizations by minimizing lost or idle assets, improving asset utilization, and reducing the need for excess inventory buffers.
Amir Khoshniyati, Wiliot
“Bluetooth® tracking tags can help organizations by minimizing lost or idle assets, improving asset utilization, and reducing the need for excess inventory buffers,” said Khoshniyati. “They can also streamline workflows by automating tracking processes that previously required manual scanning or paperwork.”
Turning assets into datapoints
Bluetooth® connectivity can turn physical assets into continuously connected data points. Instead of relying on manual scans or periodic updates, organizations gain real-time visibility into where goods are and how they are moving and being handled.
According to Amir Khoshniyati, from Wiliot, continuous streams of location and condition data allow teams to identify delays, bottlenecks, or risks early, before they become operational issues. “For example, if pallets begin accumulating in a specific facility or shipments deviate from expected routes, teams can intervene immediately,” said Khoshniyati. Organizations can shift from reacting to problems after they occur to proactively optimizing flows, improving planning accuracy, and maintaining smoother operations across the entire network.
Fabio Belloni, CEO and co-founder of Quuppa, agrees that precise location data helps teams visualize movement patterns and understand how processes unfold on the factory floor, turning previously hidden operational activity into measurable data that supports better planning and decision-making.
“Any Bluetooth® device, either with an inbuilt radio or equipped with an external device attached to it, can be reliably tracked in real time,” said Belloni. “New insights become possible when organizations can continuously monitor asset and workforce movement within a facility.”
From small to large facilities, including multi-building sites, continuous monitoring provides insight into visibility gaps, such as asset utilization, workflow inefficiencies, and worker movement trends. These insights allow organizations to quantify how space, equipment, and personnel are used and to identify opportunities for optimization. Over time, this data can support predictive analytics and digital twin models of operations.
“More and more customers are saving their RTLS information in a data lake, which can be used for machine learning model training and/or directly drive AI models,” said Belloni. “Bluetooth® Direction Finding can be leveraged to implement accurate, reliable, and flexible RTLS. Having consistent RTLS data is essential for reliably driving machine learning/AI initiatives.”
Bluetooth® Direction Finding can be leveraged to implement accurate, reliable, and flexible RTLS. Having consistent RTLS data is essential for reliably driving machine learning/AI initiatives.
Fabio Belloni, Quuppa
Real-time data, collected via Bluetooth technology, helps plant managers make faster, more informed decisions to keep production running smoothly. Bluetooth connectivity gives operators and technicians immediate access to the information they need to strategically enhance operational efficiency.
Optimizing operational performance with Bluetooth® NLC
Bluetooth® Networked Lighting Control (NLC) can turn a facility’s lighting infrastructure into a dense, always-on Bluetooth location services solution rather than a standalone lighting system. By transforming lighting from a single-purpose system into a facility-wide sensing and location platform, asset tracking becomes more scalable, cost-effective, and tightly integrated with industrial operations.
“The distributed intelligence of Bluetooth NLC provides a bi-directional exchange of key data with other systems to ensure that we know everything is working well and responding as it should,” said Clinton Milligan, senior product line manager at Sylvania Group. “A well-designed system enables high resilience where, if a device fails, we do not have a single point of failure and key actions continue to operate. This robustness enables not only excellent energy saving and occupant safety but also forms the backbone for real-time monitoring, energy optimization, safety assurance, and even proactive maintenance planning, which is critical in industrial facilities.”
Miligan goes on to say that removing the need for control wiring allows Bluetooth® NLC solutions to minimize downtime and allow operations to scale easily as facilities evolve. “Industrial spaces are especially difficult and expensive to pull new cabling,” said Miligan. “80 percent of buildings existing today will still be in use in 2050, so we must bring solutions that can be retrofitted easily, with minimum disruption and downtime. And Bluetooth NLC solutions can be installed as easily as a non-controlled solution.”
As the cost of adoption lowers, and as energy costs rise, there will be greater integration between wireless lighting systems and industrial infrastructures. Combined with the advent of AI, the analysis of usage data will allow automated re-configuration of systems to enhance efficiency and improve day-to-day operations.
Bluetooth® NLC is the only full-stack standard for wireless lighting control, enabling true multi-vendor interoperability and mass adoption of wireless lighting control, making it ideal for optimizing operations across industrial spaces.
Shaping next-gen industrial operations
As manufacturers and logistics leaders work to build more resilient supply chains, Bluetooth continues to shape the next generation of connected operations.
“Bluetooth is rapidly becoming a foundational connectivity layer for large-scale supply chain sensing because it is low power, widely supported, and compatible with existing infrastructure such as smartphones, gateways, and IoT devices,” said Amir Khoshniyati from Wiliot.
Bluetooth connectivity is helping to bridge the gap between digital systems and the physical world. By making everyday goods and assets visible and communicative, organizations can build more adaptive and resilient supply networks. This is enabling new capabilities, such as automated inventory visibility, real-time logistics orchestration, predictive disruption management, and large-scale asset intelligence. “Bluetooth sensing helps create supply chains that are not only more efficient, but also more transparent, responsive, and sustainable,” said Khoshniyati.
“In the context of intralogistics, manufacturers analyze location data to track how materials and equipment move between stations and storage areas,” said Fabio Belloni from Quuppa. “By identifying delays, congestion points, or underutilized assets, they can redesign workflows, reduce dwell times, and balance workloads across production lines. The result is smoother material flow, higher throughput and efficiency, as well as more predictable operations.”
Learn more about how Bluetooth solutions are being used to enhance productivity across industrial spaces.
Feilo Sylvania International Group Kft. (‘Feilo Sylvania’ or ’Sylvania Group’) is an independent company headquartered in Budapest, Hungary. Feilo Sylvania owns and uses the “Sylvania” brand in various territories outside North America and Australia.
