Tracking material is a separate purchase
The forklift project can pay back within six months. Someone adds a tag for every cage because the building is large. The cage count, not the roof, is what blows the payback.
Why movers and material do not share a price
A forklift fleet is tens of tracked units, and those trucks already cost a lot to run. Seeing where they go can pay for a modest set of tags and tablets. Cages, stillages, and returnables multiply hardware, batteries, and replacements by how many items you tag. A 100,000 m² (about 1.08 million ft²) hall does not by itself justify a battery tag on every cage. The time people spend hunting, and the WIP that goes missing, have to pay that extra purchase back within six months.
Choosing whether to track the truck or the load is described in tagging the mover vs tagging the material. This page is about what that choice costs.
The material combination that matches the path
Keep the fleet combination that already fits the building: inverted BLE in a small hall, a pack on the truck when the hall is large and the fleet is small, a shared grid when both are large. For material, pick the layer that matches how the item moves. Dock or aisle gates answer whether it passed. Exciters answer which bay. Ceiling RFID answers a live position for many passive items when a battery on each one will not pay. VHF fits when many items must stay visible across halls and yards. That indoor and outdoor case is described in indoor and outdoor on the same move.
Industry practice treats a portal read as the cheap identity check and continuous location as the expensive one. Most warehouse questions about a pallet are answered at a gate or a bay. Paying for a continuous trail on every cage is a separate decision.
When tagging material earns the cost back
Pay for material tracking only where people already lose paid time hunting, or where a missing load stops a line. A documented white-goods hall recovered about 20 minutes of production a day and removed micro-stops with pull dispatch. That came from coordination, not from a tag on every cage. The production result is described in twenty minutes of production back every day. It does not justify tagging every cage if nobody measured the hunt.
Locations that you do fund, movers and the materials that passed the test, still share the spatially oriented dataset. Correlation and causality analytics can ask which missing cage keeps preceding a starve. Live search is part of internal logistics optimization.
How teams keep the two purchases apart
1. Finish the forklift purchase first, and check that it pays back within six months on that building - How that test works is described in the six-month return depends on the combination.
2. Count hunt minutes and lost WIP on one cage family before any material tag order - Building size is not the count.
3. Match the material technology to the path - Gate, bay presence, passive ceiling location, or VHF when the item crosses buildings.
4. Include battery replacements in the cost that must pay back within six months - A cheap tag that dies in year two is still part of this purchase. What to include is listed in what to include when calculating RTLS ROI.
What the product can do is on the features overview. How a rollout is priced is on pricing.
Get in touch if a cage-tag line is being added because the building is large, not because anyone measured the hunt.