Background
High Concrete Group, based in Denver, Pennsylvania, is one of the largest precast concrete manufacturers in the eastern United States. Their products — architectural precast panels, structural double tees, beams, columns, hollow core planks, and specialized elements — go into universities, hospitals, parking structures, and commercial buildings across the region.
A precast concrete element is not a commodity. Each piece is manufactured to a specific project specification, a specific dimension, a specific finish and color, and a specific structural requirement. A 50-foot double tee weighing 40,000 pounds is also a specific piece for a specific project — mis-delivered to the wrong site or staged in the wrong location means a delay that cascades across the project schedule.
High Concrete operates multiple manufacturing plants and yard areas covering significant acreage. At any given time, the active yard inventory might contain thousands of pieces in various stages of production, curing, staging for delivery, and storage. Managing that inventory — knowing where each piece is, when it was cast, when it can ship, and what truck it goes on — is a core operational challenge.
Before VX-Olympus, that inventory management was a combination of paper records, whiteboard staging plans, and tribal knowledge. The “roughly” was the problem.
The Challenge
Yard Location Uncertainty
High Concrete’s production yard is organized into zones: forms and casting beds, curing areas, finished goods staging, and product-specific sections. The zones are physically defined by concrete barriers, paving markings, and signage — but within each zone, individual pieces were placed based on equipment availability and yard supervisor judgment, not against a digital inventory system.
A delivery order for a specific project required: identifying which pieces were designated for that project, locating them in the yard, staging them in the correct sequence for crane loading, and loading the delivery truck in the order the pieces would be erected on-site.
The search and staging step — finding the pieces and getting them in order — could take 15–45 minutes per truck depending on how scattered the pieces were and whether any had been relocated since the last check.
With 15–20 trucks dispatched daily across multiple projects, that search time accumulated to 3–7 hours of yard supervisor and crane operator time daily. Per annual working days, that was hundreds of hours spent finding things that had a defined location — just not a recorded one.
Mis-Shipment Risk
The more serious operational risk was mis-shipment: a piece from Project A shipped to Project B’s delivery address, or two pieces from the same project loaded in the wrong sequence (sequence matters — the piece that goes up first must come off the truck last, since trucks deliver from the back).
High Concrete had formal quality control checks in the loading process, but those checks added time and were vulnerable to human error under the time pressure of daily dispatches. Any mis-shipment that reached a job site created a significant problem: a crane, crew, and project schedule waiting for a piece that could not be erected.
Inventory Count and Location Verification
Project managers needed current inventory status: which pieces for a project were cast, which were in curing, which were ready to ship, and where specifically in the yard they were located for staging planning. Getting this information required a physical yard walk or a call to the yard supervisor — neither of which provided real-time information.
The Solution
VX-Olympus deployed a two-layer tracking system:
Layer 1: Zone-Level RTLS for Inventory Management
BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) asset tags were affixed to each precast element during or immediately after casting. RTLS reader units were mounted at zone entry/exit points throughout the production and yard areas.
When an element moved from the casting area to the curing zone, its tag was detected by the zone transition reader and its location record updated in VX-Olympus automatically. When it moved from curing to finished goods staging, the same event fired. Each zone transition created a timestamped location update — providing not just where the piece was, but how long it had been in each stage.
Zone-level accuracy (rather than precise X-Y positioning) was sufficient for the use case: the goal was to know which zone an element was in, enabling yard supervisors to search within a defined 100–200 foot zone rather than across the entire acreage.
Layer 2: QR/Barcode Scan at Key Process Steps
For shipping specifically — the highest-stakes step where wrong pieces mean a costly mis-shipment — VX-Olympus integrated a scan verification step. Loaders scanned each piece’s QR code with a mobile device before loading, and the VX-Olympus delivery manifest confirmed the piece was correct for the load order.
If a piece scanned did not match the delivery manifest, the VX-Olympus app gave an immediate warning — before the piece was loaded, not after it arrived at the wrong site.
VX-Olympus Configuration
- Each precast element registered as a device in VX-Olympus with project assignment, element number, dimension, weight, and status
- Zone transition rules fired status updates (In Forms → Curing → Finished Goods → Staged for Delivery → Shipped)
- Delivery manifest view in VX-Olympus showed each planned delivery with piece list, sequence, and loading status
- Project manager portal: project-specific view showing all pieces for that project with current status and location zone
The Results
Search Time Reduction
In the 90 days following full deployment, High Concrete tracked loading prep time per truck:
- Before deployment baseline: 22 minutes average search and staging time per truck
- Post-deployment (90 days): 8 minutes average search and staging time per truck
The zone-level location data meant that yard supervisors directed crane operators directly to the relevant zone rather than searching the full yard. The remaining 8 minutes was primarily the crane travel and rigging time — not search time.
At 17 trucks per day average, the time reduction of 14 minutes per truck represented approximately 4 hours of productive capacity recovered daily for crane operators and yard supervisors.
Mis-Shipments: Near Zero
In the 12 months prior to deployment, High Concrete had 4 confirmed mis-shipment events where incorrect pieces were loaded and reached a job site, requiring return trips, schedule delays, and in one case a crane hold while the correct piece was expedited.
In the 10 months following deployment (the case study period), High Concrete had 1 event where a scan mismatch was caught at load time — the piece was not loaded, the correct piece was found and loaded, and the delivery was made without a project delay.
The scan verification step at loading caught the near-miss. No pieces shipped to wrong destinations in the measurement period.
Inventory Visibility for Project Management
Project managers gained a self-service view of their project’s elements in VX-Olympus — status and location zone for every piece. The daily calls to the yard supervisor requesting inventory status dropped by approximately 80%, by the yard team’s estimate.
For project scheduling — coordinating delivery dates with site erection schedules — project managers could now pull current inventory status directly rather than requesting a yard walk. This improved the accuracy of delivery scheduling and reduced last-minute delivery request changes.
Lessons From the Deployment
Tag placement on precast elements: The initial deployment tested several BLE tag mounting approaches. Tags embedded in foam pads placed on element surfaces during curing were the most durable — they survived the yard environment, the pressure washing during finishing, and the outdoor weather exposure. Tags applied as stickers to finished surfaces degraded over time. The foam-pad mounting approach was standardized after the first 30-day pilot.
Zone boundary calibration: Initial zone boundary definitions were too coarse — some large zones contained elements from multiple projects staged together, creating ambiguity. Zone boundaries were refined in week 3 to create smaller, more project-specific staging areas where possible.
Integration with ERP: High Concrete’s project management system (ERP) tracked production orders but not physical yard location. VX-Olympus location data fed into the ERP via API to create a single source of truth for project status. This integration required 2 weeks of IT coordination with the ERP vendor.
Conclusion
High Concrete Group’s VX-Olympus deployment addressed a practical yard management problem: knowing where high-value, project-specific assets were located in a large, dynamic yard environment.
The results were operational and financial: 4 hours per day of crane and yard supervisor time recovered, near-elimination of mis-shipments, and self-service inventory visibility for project management.
For a precast manufacturer where the asset being tracked is worth $10,000–$100,000 per piece and mis-delivery causes project delays measured in days, the operational value of location accuracy is clear and direct.
Talk to our team about an asset tracking deployment for your manufacturing or yard environment.