Production Tracking System

Jason of Beverly Hills, a luxury jewelry manufacturer creating custom pieces worth $50,000+, was losing track of items as they moved through their production floor. With 8 distinct stages from design to final polish, pieces would go missing for days, causing delivery delays and client frustration.

Their existing system was paper-based: clipboards, handwritten logs, and a whiteboard that was perpetually out of date. When a client called asking about their piece, staff would physically walk the floor trying to locate it.

The stakes were high. A single misplaced piece could mean a $100k item sitting in the wrong department while a client's anniversary passed. They needed real-time visibility without disrupting their craftsmen's workflow.

I designed an RFID-based tracking system where each piece gets a small tag attached to its work order. Antenna readers at each workstation automatically detect when pieces enter and leave, publishing events via MQTT to AWS IoT Core.

The key insight was making tracking passive. Jewelers don't scan anything. They just do their work. The system watches and records. This was critical for adoption since craftsmen are focused on precision work, not paperwork.

We built a real-time dashboard showing every piece's current location, time in each stage, and alerts for items that have been stationary too long. Management can see bottlenecks forming before they cause delays.