The economic impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) on factories, retail settings, work sites, offices, and homes could total as much as $6.3 trillion by 2025, according to McKinsey Global. While some of this impact will be from the direct deployment of sensors and hardware in commercial, retail and industrial buildings, IoT will also have a significant effect on building management software, applications and services. IoT-based solutions in the industrial space offer the potential to create increased efficiencies for a range of applications from fleet management to smart mining and construction. 

Author: Pierre Gelpi, Director of Vertical Marketing for Smart Supply Chain & Logistics in Semtech’s Wireless and Sensing Products Group

According to IHS Markit, asset management is predicted to represent the largest vertical market for low-power wide-area networking (LPWAN) applications by 2023. Semtech’s LoRa® devices and the LoRaWAN® protocol are a leading platform for LPWAN-based IoT solutions, with more than 117 million end nodes deployed in over 140 countries today. LoRa-based solutions have been successfully utilized in several hundred known use cases for a wide variety of verticals including supply chain and logistics.

In a notable deployment, MachineMax, a leading provider of smart solutions for fleet management, construction and mining applications, integrated LoRa devices into a line of new smart usage trackers for heavy machinery. Machine idling, where a machine’s engine is running but the machine is not actively in use, accounts for an estimated 37 percent of the time a construction or mining machine is operating on average. Idling results in an increased amount of fuel waste and machine wear, without creating productive output. Previously, monitoring the usage status of a mining or construction fleet was accomplished manually, with site managers continually checking on the use status of machines, an expensive and time consuming task. 

MachineMax’s LoRa-based solutions deploy onto fleet machines in under a minute. The devices attach magnetically and gather real-time data on machine usage status, such as whether or not a machine is idle. With real-time data on when a machine is in use, site managers can make more efficient use of a machine’s time to prevent idling, reducing the amount of fuel used and prolonging machine life to bring a quick return on investment for the management company. Learn more about this unique use case in the 2019 press announcement between Semtech and MachineMax. 

LoRa devices and the LoRaWAN protocol make it easy and affordable for smart supply chain and logistics to track highly valued assets in transit and connect systems to the Cloud. Looking to learn more about the many uses of LoRa in smart asset management and logistics? Explore an expansive list of LoRa-based use cases on the Semtech website.

Explore Smart Supply Chain and Logistics Use Cases

LoRa is a registered trademark or service mark of Semtech Corporation or its affiliates.