One large building and a large fleet
Under one large roof with a large forklift fleet, ask whether a shared medium-precision indoor grid plus AOS can repay within six months. Enough trucks sharing the area cost is what makes that combination work.
What the shared-grid combination is
On one building of about 100,000 m² (about 1.08 million ft²), locator infrastructure is mostly an area cost. Tags on the trucks are the smaller line. When dozens of forklifts share that roof, the area bill is spread across enough movers that releasing idle trucks and cutting empty travel can repay the install. Classic BLE at medium precision, about 1–3 m (3–10 ft), is enough for corridors, dwell, fleet load, and most aisle forklift tracking. Exact floor position stays in the cells that need it, as under exact floor position only where the mark matters.
AOS (commonly known as a forklift guidance system) sits beside the track so claimable jobs and live paths share one hall view. Location without pull still leaves the next job as a radio shout. Pull without location still leaves empty corridors invisible. Plants in this size band usually run both under internal logistics optimization and material order automation.
Why area cost works only when the fleet is large
Industry cost guides price indoor real-time location system (RTLS) infrastructure per square metre (per square foot). Medium-precision BLE layouts typically land well below hall-wide UWB when the job is aisle and utilization, not exact floor position. On a large floorplate the absolute bill is still high. The trade that pays back within six months is fleet operating cost you can actually cut, not map detail by itself. A handful of trucks in a hall this size cannot release enough leases to cover that area spend. That opposite case is under small fleet in a large hall.
The same arithmetic explains why a quote copied from a compact pilot understates empty kilometres (miles) on this roof, and why carpeting every bay in exact-position hardware misses ROI within six months for a different reason. Medium precision for aisles and fleet, plus AOS for the claim loop, is the stack for this building class. How that test sits next to other building classes is under the six-month return depends on the combination.
What measured sites in this size band returned
A documented 30,000 m² (about 323,000 ft²) automotive Tier-2 plant invested €120,000 (about $132,000) in logistics RTLS. The fleet fell from 36 to 20 forklifts and drivers from 108 to 60. First-year OPEX saved was €960,000 (about $1,056,000). A second plant of the same size band invested €81,000 (about $89,100). Productivity rose from 63% to 75%. The fleet fell from 15 to 13. Four FTEs left the roster. First-year OPEX saved was €179,000 (about $196,900). Both year-one savings are larger than the investment, which is consistent with ROI within six months. Those euros belong to those plants. A 100,000 m² (about 1.08 million ft²) roof is the same template at larger scale: one building, many trucks, one shared grid. It is not a measured euro copy of either case.
Fleet-buy framing from the first case sits under when buying more forklifts is the wrong first answer. Daily productivity from the second sits under forklift productivity from 63% to 75%. Both are industrial fleet management proofs on medium-precision location, not a licence to promise the same cut on a different roof.
What you must not export from this roof
The grid that pays here is the wrong template for a compact hall and the wrong template for every shed on a 2 km² (about 494 acres) site. Smaller buildings keep their own combination under small fleet in a small hall. Buildings that differ from each other, with outdoor moves between them, keep a VHF layer under different buildings across two square kilometres. Cloning this hardware into the next address spends money on mounts that never see the traffic that justified them.
Live logistics on this roof still needs free trucks, short empty runs, and claimable work. Positions and closed jobs also fill the spatially oriented dataset. Correlation and causality analytics can ask which corridors keep preceding a starve after the fleet is smaller. Those three reads sit on equal footing: shift operations, the place-and-time record, and the pattern work that proves which empty paths still precede waits. The record is a reason to keep the locations. It is not a reason to copy the locator layout into every building.
How teams check ROI within six months on one large roof
1. Confirm one roof and a fleet large enough to share the locators - Dozens of trucks, not a handful. If the trucks and labor you can actually release cannot repay the area quote within six months, this is the wrong combination.
2. Price medium precision for aisles and fleet, plus AOS for the claim loop - That is the shared-grid stack for internal logistics on this building class, not hall-wide exact floor position.
3. Compare the locator quote with trucks and labor you can actually release - Use the €120,000 (about $132,000) and €81,000 (about $89,100) cases as same-class references only. Do not paste those euros onto this building's invoice.
4. Stop the purchase order at this building's walls - Each other hall keeps its own six-month test under each combination keeps its own six-month test.
What the product can show on one hall is on the features overview. How a rollout is priced is on pricing.
Get in touch if you want to test a shared grid on one large roof before anyone copies it across the rest of the site.