You Can’t Automate What You Can’t Find: RTLS and the Data Foundation for Lights-Out | Ep. 47

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Every shop runs on a little tribal knowledge, the person who just knows where that tray of parts is headed and where it tends to get stuck. It works right up until they take a day off and the whole floor is hunting for a job that vanished somewhere between the mill and the heat treat rack. That gap is exactly what this episode is about: what happens when you stop guessing and start actually seeing where everything is.

Dave and Eric brought in Mitch Tucker of HID to break down RTLS, real-time location systems. In plain terms, RTLS tracks where your things are, your parts, your tooling, your material, even your people. The part that matters for us is where that data lives. It sits in the white space between your controlled processes, the handoffs and the staging and the waiting, and that’s where most shops are quietly bleeding time.

Mitch’s big point is that this isn’t just a giant-warehouse toy. The same search-time problem that costs a 200 person facility around $400,000 a year shows up in a five person shop as a machine sitting idle while somebody looks for a tool that’s thirty feet away. He makes the case for starting small and scaling deliberately, from a simple RFID setup to Bluetooth to ultra-wideband, matching the system to the size of your business instead of buying the most expensive thing in the room.

There’s a real consulting streak to how Mitch approaches this, and it lines up with everything we preach. You don’t drop RTLS into a chaotic shop. You know your processes first, you go to GEMBA and watch the work, you do your 5S, and then you add the visibility layer on top of a floor you already understand. From there the location data starts paying off in places you don’t expect: the connected worker, safety and evacuation roll calls, job costing, and the honest conversation about where useful data ends and surveillance begins.

The throughline is one we come back to constantly. You can’t run lights out, and you definitely can’t jump to what Mitch calls Industry 5.0 and the AI wave behind it, without the data foundation underneath. Location data is a huge part of that foundation. If you’ve ever lost an afternoon to a missing tool, start here.

What’s Covered in this Episode

• (0:00) A real-world RTLS use case: intruder detection at an aerospace and defense facility
• (3:35) Learn more about Mitch Tucker and his role at HID as a consultant
• (5:00) What is RTLS? How is it useful in manufacturing?
• (6:20) The Kent problem: tribal knowledge and the parts that get lost between processes
• (8:03) Mitch’s path from engineering drawings to continuous improvement evangelist
• (13:26) Is RTLS only for giant warehouses? Who does it apply to? How does it work?
• (18:56) Head to Kennametal’s Next Level Shop at IMTS 2026, booth 431800
• (20:00) Digital twins, RTLS data, and using real-time visibility as a sales tool
• (22:20) Why RTLS is becoming a commodity and the coming rush toward Industry 5.0
• (24:44) A wild use case revisited: cameras, LIDAR, and location data for intruder detection
• (26:22) Why you should head to the IMTS Job Shops Workshop
• (27:13) How to actually get started and why the consultant comes before the sale
• (30:27) Scaling from RFID to Bluetooth to ultra-wideband, and installing once
• (33:24) Rolling RTLS from one facility to the next on the same software
• (34:20) The $400,000 question: what search time quietly costs a shop
• (37:36) Thin margins, throughput, and how one lost tool can sink a small shop
• (39:53) Connected worker, safety, and job costing without turning into Big Brother
• (44:08) Why we created Hire MFG Leaders and why you should use it
• (44:37) Mitch’s low-hanging fruit: know your processes, go to GEMBA, and do your 5S

Resources Mentioned

• HID
• Kennametal
• IMTS Job Shops Workshop
• Hire MFG Leaders

Connect with Mitch Tucker

• HID
• Connect with Mitch Tucker on LinkedIn