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InFlow use case

WIP tracking for jobs, travelers and line-side carts

InFlow does WIP tracking for the jobs, travelers, job bins and line-side carts that move between workstations all day. Each one is tied to its workstation automatically, jobs that stop moving get flagged, and every handoff becomes data for cycle-time and bottleneck analysis.

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Bright production hall with workstations, machine cells and orange line-side carts along a marked aisle

The problem

“Where is the job?” is the most expensive question on the floor.

A production order is released at 8:12 a.m. By noon nobody knows which workstation has it. The traveler left one station, the next operator never registered it, and the ERP still shows the order as active.

Paper travelers move with the work, but they create no event when they leave one station or reach the next. On a busy shift scans get skipped, so the MES shows what should be happening while the floor tells a different story.

Jobs & orders
Production and work orders, batches and assemblies
Travelers
Tagged traveler documents linked to the work order
Bins & carts
Job bins, kits and line-side carts
Tools at the station
Tools used at each workstation (with back-end integration)

What changes

What WIP tracking shows you

  • Every job linked to its workstation automatically, with its last-known location on an indoor map
  • Dwell-time and route alerts when a job stalls, skips a stage or turns up in the wrong area
  • Wrong work-order materials caught at the workbench, and alerts for jobs held up by missing items
  • Planned versus actual cycle times, live production-order completion and bottleneck analysis

Counts can go down to the worker. At Continental Floral Greens every wreath is credited to the station and worker who built it, and accepts and rejects are traced to their source. In another production deployment with more than 17 workstations and roughly 400,000 products a year, real-time reconciliation of assembled and rejected items saved about $120,000 in labor.

How it works

Capture, understand, act.

  1. CaptureRFID tags on travelers, bins, carts and products, antennas at workbenches, conveyors and stage gates, and badge reads that link workers to stations.
  2. UnderstandTrapeze links each job to its workstation and stage, measures dwell time and applies route rules.
  3. ActWorkstation displays, supervisor alerts, a live floor-level production overview, and real-time updates to your MES or ERP.

Work-in-progress tracking

Three things worth following on the floor.

Job and traveler tracking

A passive RFID label on the traveler is read by an antenna at each workbench. The job is linked to the station without a scan, the time it waited in between is recorded, and the MES gets the update in real time.

Line-side carts and job bins

Carts and bins carry Bluetooth LE or RFID tags, so you see which cart is at which station and which one has been parked in an aisle for an hour. UWB is there when two stations sit too close for zone-level location.

Per-worker counts at the station

Badge reads link a worker to a station and each unit built there is credited to them, shown live on a station display. That is how Continental Floral Greens counts more than a million wreaths a season.

Workflows this use case improves

Part of the InFlow material lifecycle.

WIP visibility & milk-runs

Job-to-workstation association, dwell-time alerts and line-side delivery.

Workflow details

Production & material planning

Kitting, picking for production and consumption reporting.

Workflow details

Stock & cycle counts

WIP inventory by station and stage, counted continuously.

Workflow details

Alerts & reports

Exceptions surface themselves.

  • WIP inventory, congestion & heat maps
  • Route & dwell-time violation
  • Material flow & throughput rate
  • Wrong material at workbench
  • Job delayed by missing items
  • Cycle time by station

Technology fit

The right sensor for each handoff.

  • UHF RFIDPassive labels on travelers and products, read by antennas at workbenches and on conveyors.
  • Bluetooth LEZone presence for carts and job bins moving across the floor.
  • UWBCentimeter-level position where job-to-station association needs precision.
  • Barcode & NFCDeliberate scans at stage gates where a manual step is acceptable.

How we choose technology

Proof

WIP visibility in production.

Manufacturing & Logistics

Continental Floral Greens

More than 1 million Christmas wreaths are tracked each September-to-November season on a line of 15 assembly stations. RFID labels, badge reads and a display at each station count every wreath per worker in real time, and accepts and rejects are traced to their station. Delivered with Zebra Technologies and Redline Solutions.

1M+wreaths tracked per Christmas season

100%accuracy in total wreath count

99.7%production approval rate

6,000–7,000wreaths tracked daily

Read the story

By vertical

Where WIP visibility matters most.

Manufacturing & Logistics

Assembly lines, production stations and seasonal, labor-intensive manufacturing.

Manufacturing & Logistics

Questions buyers ask

WIP tracking FAQ

Do we have to replace our MES or ERP?

No. Real-time data exchange keeps your existing database or MES aligned with what happens on the floor. EAI-Bridge connects to SAP, Oracle and MES platforms, so planners keep working in the tools they know.

Can we start with one line or one handoff?

Yes, and that is usually the best start. Record when orders leave one station, when they reach the next and how long they wait in between, then expand. Trapeze runs on a single server for a pilot and scales to high-availability clusters. Read: how to track jobs across the production floor.

Can it report worker productivity at stations?

Yes. Time at assigned workbenches and cycle times can be linked to workers for productivity reports, as at Continental Floral Greens. For presence, safety and labor reporting across a whole site, see InStep.

Related reading

More on WIP and production visibility

Part of InFlow

One material tracking application for every material in motion.

Jobs and travelers is one of four InFlow use cases, alongside goods and consumables, parts and raw materials, and shipments and milk runs. All four run on the same InThing platform.

Explore InFlow
The platform
Platform
Trapeze · Visium · EAI-Bridge

Find your WIP blind spots

Bring the handoff that hurts most.

We’ll look at where jobs wait today, what your MES already knows, and which capture method turns each handoff into a reliable event.

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