Business Weekly - Cambridge, UK

RTLS pioneer, Ubisense has teamed up with fellow Cambridge firm, aerospace consultancy Marshall Solutions to set up what the partners are callling an "aerospace production RTLS competence centre" in the city.

The centre, which is "designed to showcase the significant benefits which precise RTLS can bring to the production environment," is based at Marshall Aerospace's Cambridge Airport site.

Marshall Solutions parent company Marshall Aerospace is the UK’s leading independent aerospace contractor.
MA employs 1,500, housed in 1.2 million square feet of hangar space, in which the Ubisense RTLS is already being used to track test equipment.

Ultra-Wideband powered RTLS is being used to track the location of test and manufacturing equipment used in the manufacture of aircraft fuel tanks.  The tanks themselves are also tracked as they proceed down the production ‘pulse-line’. 

Marshall Aerospace said it is already seeing benefits in terms of cost reduction, man-power savings, reductions in tool loss, and safety improvements.

Peter Hiscocks, CEO of Marshall Solutions said: “RTLS has improved the efficiency of our manufacturing operations and we know that this technology has applications across the aerospace manufacturing, MRO and airports businesses.  We will use our RTLS system to demonstrate to other potential customers the effectiveness of this approach and the types of savings that they can achieve.”

This kind of innovative application of cutting-edge technology is Hiscocks' stock-in-trade. As former director of Cambridge University's commercial operations, he is particularly well-versed in most of the hot technologies coming out of the Cambridge cluster.

Ubisense was formed by a group of engineers made redundant by the closure of AT&T's Cambridge research lab. The former director of the lab - and now head of Cambridge University's computer lab - Andy Hopper remains the company's chairman.