Frequently asked questions: answered without the brochure.

Discovery and strategy work, technology selection, RFP support, PoC and pilot design, programme assurance, location-analytics builds, AGV/AMR fleet advisory, programme recovery and expert review.

Engagements range from a short discovery stage to multi-site programmes. Indicative fees are published on How we work. Examples of the work our advisers led in earlier roles are in the case studies.

If your problem doesn't fit one of these shapes, we'll tell you on the first call rather than reshape it to sell more days.

We don't sell hardware, so our advice stays independent. We work for you, not for the technology providers.

Three patterns. Fees agreed in writing after scoping for scoped deliverables such as a discovery stage, supplier selection and RFP support, or pilot design. Day-rate advisory and retainers for ongoing governance. Outcome-based fees on full programme delivery, where part of the fee is tied to agreed acceptance criteria.

Indicative ranges for each are published on How we work & fees and confirmed in writing after a free 30-minute call. We can quote in GBP, EUR or USD.

Yes, with reasonable redlines. We can also provide our own template MSA, SOW and DPA as a starting point.

Supplier-onboarding information your procurement team needs is provided during contracting, and we aim to turn contracts around within 5-10 working days of term-sheet agreement.

A mutual NDA is available on request, and we can sign yours. Confidential information shared during pre-contract conversations is treated as confidential whether or not an NDA is signed.

We never use a client's name, supplier stack or commercial terms as a reference without explicit written approval, which is why client names on this site are withheld. We also sign multi-party NDAs for engagements involving a system integrator or hardware supplier.

Core advisory work is led by our advisers and delivered by the people named in the proposal. There is no bait-and-switch between proposal and delivery.

We do the work ourselves, including RF site surveys and on-site installation. On some projects we may bring in a delivery partner, only with your written agreement and under a written contract with confidentiality, data protection and security terms. If your project needs hands-on work that TRACIO does not do, such as ATEX-certified electrical work, you contract that provider directly, and we specify and check the work. We do MES and WMS integration, MES interlocks and OPC UA connections, working with your IT and OT team and under your change control. We don’t run your production systems day to day.

UWB (FiRa, IEEE 802.15.4z) for precise positioning, BLE 5.x with AoA for 1-3 m room/zone work, Passive RFID (EPC Gen2v2 / ISO 18000-63) for item-level visibility, active RFID and sensor tags for harsh environments,

GPS / GNSS / RTK for outdoor and cm-grade survey, LoRaWAN, Sigfox, NB-IoT, LTE-M for wide-area sensors, Wi-Fi 6E RTT and FTM for opportunistic indoor positioning, plus ultrasound, vision, and SLAM for infrastructure-free use cases. UWB is usually the most precise of these options. The accuracy you get depends on your site, and we confirm it in the survey.

We pick the technology to fit the use case, not the other way around, and a single programme will routinely mix three or four of these layers. Where the right answer is no RTLS at all (e.g. a process or labelling fix), we'll say so.

We design the location-analytics and integration layer, define the data model, specify the event schema and oversee the build.

Implementation can be delivered three ways: by a delivery team sized to the scope on a scoped increment, by your in-house team working under our technical leadership and acceptance gates, or by a system integrator we help you select and govern.

Common stacks include Kafka or Kinesis for event transport, MQTT at the edge, a time-series store such as TimescaleDB or ClickHouse, and a thin React or Power BI layer for operator views. We are not building a product: the IP we hand over is yours, with full source and documentation.

On the ERP and supply-chain side: SAP S/4HANA + EWM, SAP MII, Oracle Fusion, Manhattan Active, Blue Yonder, Körber, Infor LN/CSI. On the shop floor: Rockwell FactoryTalk, Siemens Opcenter, GE Proficy, AVEVA, plus PLC / SCADA layers via OPC UA.

On the clinical side: Epic, Cerner / Oracle Health, Meditech, InterSystems, with HL7 v2 and FHIR R4 messaging. For service management and assets: ServiceNow IRM / HAM, IBM Maximo, Infor EAM.

Everything else (bespoke MES, EMR, CMMS, WMS, TMS, YMS) we connect through OPC UA, HL7 / FHIR, REST, GraphQL, or MQTT depending on what the system speaks natively.

No default. The platform decision should follow your data-residency, integration and TCO requirements, not the other way round.

We assess the major cloud IoT services (Azure, AWS and others), open-source options such as Eclipse ThingsBoard and Hono, industrial platforms, and on-premise Kubernetes where sovereignty requires it, and we model the platform choice explicitly in the five-year TCO of the selection report.

Discovery and use-case framing: 2-4 weeks. Independent technology selection report with supplier scoring and ROI: 4-6 weeks. Proof of concept in a controlled bay or zone: 4-8 weeks. Single-site pilot with operator adoption: 8-16 weeks.

Full multi-site rollout: typically 6-18 months, depending on facility count, change management and integration scope. Programme recovery: a paid 1-week diagnostic with a written go/no-go recommendation, followed by 2-3 weeks of recovery planning.

We publish a milestone plan at SOW signature and report variance weekly.

For data protection: GDPR / UK DPA 2018, plus DPIA / TIA preparation for cross-border transfers. For life sciences and clinical: 21 CFR Part 11, EU Annex 11, GxP, DSCSA, EU FMD, GDP.

For industrial: IEC 62443 for OT cybersecurity, ISA-95 / Purdue Model for OT/IT layering, AS9100D for aerospace, IATF 16949 for automotive.

For hazardous areas: ATEX and IECEx zone-rated hardware specification. For cyber and resilience: NIST CSF, NIS2 and DORA, and we can help clients prepare their locating systems for ISO 27001 or SOC 2 audits.

TRACIO is not ISO 27001 or SOC 2 certified, and we are not an auditor or certification body. See the Standards page for the full list.

The aerospace and defence experience behind TRACIO is our advisers’ own, from roles held before the company was formed: RFID and RTLS programmes including aerospace MRO tool control and defence depot inventory, in regulated and access-controlled environments, including experience on UK defence programmes. We keep TRACIO’s work unclassified, and we work within your export-control process.

We will not run a programme remotely where the operational reality demands on-site presence. References available under separate cover for vetted procurement contacts.

We work with clients worldwide, across EMEA, APAC and the Americas. References are available on request under NDA.

Delivery is remote-first, with on-site presence at the moments that need it: site survey, anchor commissioning, pilot go-live and executive workshops. We adjust to regional regulatory specifics, including ETSI vs FCC RF power limits, regional UWB channel rules, and EU vs US healthcare integration norms.

Our public website and corporate systems run on EU-headquartered providers inside the EU. Client-engagement data (documents, meeting notes, deliverables and any operational data we touch) is kept in the region your data-residency requirements call for, or directly inside your own tenant.

Each engagement DPA documents the processing locations, sub-processors, retention periods and deletion procedures, and we will not move data outside the EU/EEA without a documented transfer impact assessment.

Email hello@tracio.com or Book a free scoping call through the contact page. We come back to all qualified enquiries within one business day, and a first 30-minute exploratory call is always free of charge and free of obligation.

If we are not the right firm for your problem (wrong region, wrong scale, conflict of interest), we will tell you on that first call and, where we can, point you toward someone who is.