Plan hub placement for a warehouse
Determine how many hubs you need and where to place them for effective asset tracking in a warehouse environment.
Start with the devices your frontline workers already carry. With the Blecon Agent installed, each one detects the tags near it wherever the worker goes, so the areas your workers move through have coverage with no hubs. Plan hubs for the areas they do not reach often enough, and for the areas that need coverage all the time.
Prerequisites
- A floor plan or measurements of your warehouse
- An understanding of which areas need tracking coverage
Step 1: Map where your workers go
Mark the routes that workers with mobile devices take through the warehouse, such as pickers, forklift drivers and the dock team. Those routes have coverage from the Blecon Agent. If the devices are managed, your MDM platform can install the app on all of them: see Mobile device management (MDM). Note the areas a device passes only now and then, such as store rooms, cages and the back of deep racking.
Step 2: Identify coverage areas
Map out the areas where you need to track tags. Mark each one as covered by the devices from step 1, or as needing hubs:
- Receiving docks
- Storage aisles
- Picking zones
- Shipping docks
- Outdoor yard areas
Step 3: Choose your accuracy level
| Accuracy target | Hub spacing | When to use |
|---|---|---|
| 2–5 metres | 10–15 metres apart | Precise aisle-level tracking |
| 5–10 metres | 15–30 metres apart | General area tracking |
| Room/area level | 1 per area | Zone presence only |
Step 4: Plan hub locations
- Ceiling mount hubs for even coverage.
- Space them according to your accuracy target.
- Avoid placing directly behind metal racking or above water pipes.
- Cover entry/exit points to detect zone transitions.
- For multi-level facilities, deploy hubs on each level.
- An outdoor yard needs no hubs where devices running the Blecon Agent have a good GPS fix. Hubs at the gates still detect entries and exits.
Step 5: Plan zones and hub positions
Plan a zone for each logical area, for example Receiving, Storage A, Storage B and Shipping. Each zone must be at least half your accuracy filter wide: 55 metres on the Balanced profile.
Plan to place each hub on the map at the position where you mount it. Assets that a placed hub detects are positioned from the hub's position, so your zones contain them. See Zones indoors.
Step 6: Plan power and connectivity
Each hub needs:
- Power: PoE or AC adapter.
- Network: Ethernet, WiFi, or cellular connectivity to the cloud.
Estimating hub count
For a typical 5,000 m² warehouse with 10-metre spacing:
- Coverage area: 5,000 m²
- Area per hub: ~100 m² (10m × 10m grid)
- Estimated hubs: ~50
Adjust up for high-accuracy areas or down for zone-only areas. Leave out the areas the devices from step 1 cover: there, anchors give the devices an accurate position indoors without hubs.