1,600 smart trackers from Sensolus give Vaillant grip on logistics fleet

Thanks to smart tracking 30,000 euros in investment costs avoided in first months

Vaillant, one of Europe's most established manufacturers of boilers and heat pump systems, has equipped its internal fleet of 1,600 logistics trolleys and trains with smart trackers from Ghent-based Sensolus. This technology gives Vaillant objective insight into the location, availability and utilization of its logistics assets for the first time. This makes manual counts in Excel redundant, helps prevent logistical disruptions and has already resulted in some €30,000 in avoided investment costs in a first project.

Vaillant produces about 166,000 boilers and heat pumps annually at its 48,000 m² production facility in Nantes, France. Behind that production is a complex internal logistics operation with a huge fleet of trolleys and logistics trains constantly moving between sheet metal working, painting, assembly and supplying production lines. Until recently, those assets were not tracked electronically, but were managed through manual counts, often in Excel.

As production volumes increased, it became increasingly difficult for Vaillant to quickly identify where certain trolleys were located, which were effectively in use and where shortages were imminent. During planned closures, several consecutive counts were sometimes needed to arrive at a reliable inventory. In addition, the company averaged about three unplanned logistics disruptions per month due to a shortage of available equipment in the right place.

Quickly deployable without additional infrastructure

“The industrial process may seem simple, but it remains complex to manage in daily practice,” says Adrien Guihery, Digital Transformation Project Manager at Vaillant. “Therefore, in 2024 we looked for a solution that was easy to implement and immediately operational, provided usable data without additional infrastructure on the production floor, and remained economically sustainable. Ultimately, our choice fell on Sensolus. Data helped us to objectify our flows and move from a very manual approach to decisions based on factual insights. The quality of cooperation with the Sensolus team also played an important role in this, especially in supporting targeted optimizations where needed.”

An initial pilot project was launched with some 40 trolleys and logistics trains. These were equipped with Sensolus trackers based on Bluetooth Low Energy technology, which require no fixed reader infrastructure and make location data directly available through a user-friendly dashboard. After less than a month, the pilot project already provided concrete insights into the movements and effective use of the fleet. Vaillant therefore decided to fully roll out the solution. By 2025, the entire fleet was equipped and the tracking data were integrated into daily operations. Today, the data is also integrated within Value Stream Mapping analyses so that operational decisions are based on measured data rather than estimates.

Less downtime, better utilization

The tracking data quickly revealed which trolleys were rarely or never used. Some of those dormant assets were stored externally and later redeployed when a project required additional equipment. In this way, Vaillant avoided purchasing new assets, accounting for about 30,000 euros in saved investment costs. The impact has also been felt operationally. Thanks to automatic alerts, Vaillant today sees in advance where shortages are imminent, so that assets can be proactively reallocated before a production line experiences disruption. This increases productivity and reduces pressure on the logistics team. After just a few months, Vaillant saw an increase of approximately 5% in the use of their logistics trolleys.

After one year of historical data, Vaillant is expanding the use of the platform.

“In addition to location management and shortage detection, the solution is now used for corrective and preventive maintenance. Trolleys in need of repair are identified faster, sent to maintenance zones and scheduled based on data. We are not 100% of the potential today, but we know the data is there. These will give us the keys to permanently optimize our logistics system,” says Adrien Guihery.

Co-development

The collaboration between Vaillant and Sensolus went beyond the traditional rollout of a tracking system.

“Together with Vaillant, we refined Bluetooth signal quality and zone delineation in the production facility, among other things. This is crucial in a complex industrial environment, where different logistics zones are close together and reliable zone recognition is essential. Industrial companies are looking for solutions that are easy to implement and provide reliable, actionable data. IoT tracking makes it possible to objectively map asset usage, reduce lost time and base continuous improvement on measurements rather than estimates.”, decision Cyril Jouanlanne, Key Account Manager at Sensolus.