FORMATION: The power to know where on FORMATION

Location Aware Inventory Management: Start Small, Get Control Fast

2026-02-24T00:00:00Z

Inventory management projects often stall before they start. The pattern is familiar: long procurement cycles, expensive consulting, and rollouts that take months before anyone on the floor sees value.

There is a more practical path.

Location-aware inventory management helps you organize what you already have. Start with your real workspace, define clear zones and virtual shelves, and tag storage locations and items with QR codes. Then add simple check-in and check-out scans so movement becomes visible. Anyone with a smartphone can do this.

No big-bang transformation. No year-long wait for results.

Real-world workspaces are messy

Many items are untracked.
Only designated warehouse storage is tracked. Everything outside that process is often invisible.
Storage structures are hard to maintain, so they drift over time.

The result is partial control: some tracked inventory, many unknown locations, and ad-hoc storage habits.

Start with the space, not the software

Traditional inventory projects often start with item lists and product codes. Location-aware inventory management starts with place structure.

Zones
Shelves
Bins
Drop zones

In FORMATION, you create these directly on the map and mark them as storage. Then you can check items in and out with barcode or QR scans.

Once each place has a clear identity, stock handling becomes more reliable. People know where things belong, where to return them, and where to look first.

A practical rollout that works in live operations

You can start without pausing daily work:

Add storage locations to the FORMATION map. Name them, configure shelves and columns, and place them where work actually happens.
Tag locations first, then high-movement or high-value items.
Use quick smartphone scan flows for check-in and check-out. Regular barcodes, product codes, and QR codes all work.
Review storage capacity on the map and find available space quickly.
Keep tracking items after checkout so they do not disappear from operational visibility.

This creates useful discipline fast, with minimal disruption.

What teams usually worry about

Most concerns are valid. They just do not require a massive project.

“We are too small for this.”
Small teams often benefit faster because standards spread quickly and exceptions are easy to spot.

“We cannot afford another rollout.”
Start with labels, phones, and a lightweight process. Expand only where results justify it.

“People will not scan consistently.”
Adoption improves when scans replace manual logging and help people find things faster.

“Our data is messy.”
Start with inventory that hurts most when missing or delayed. Accuracy improves step by step.

Why this approach delivers early value

Location-aware inventory management is not tracking for tracking’s sake. It reduces daily friction:

Less time searching
Fewer stock surprises
Better handovers between shifts
Faster receiving and picking decisions
Clearer visibility into overflow and ad-hoc storage

As teams mature, the same location model can support process insights, aging stock detection, and workflow automation. You do not need all of that on day one.

Use hardware positioning to automate inventory updates

Use Ultra Wide Band or Bluetooth based hardware positioning solutions (RTLS) to automatically update your inventory when things are moved.

With FORMATION’s Hybrid Tracking you can mix and match tracking solutions: use scan-based flows for high-volume, low-value items and actively track selected items with hardware solutions.

As your setup grows, Hierarchical Tracking helps you organize storage, containers, and item relationships so location updates stay useful at every level.

In practice:

Hardware positioning updates locations automatically for selected assets.
QR workflows keep costs low for long-tail inventory.
Both streams feed the same map and storage logic.

Build confidence first, then scale

The most effective approach is simple: prove value in one area, standardize what works, then expand zone by zone.

That is how inventory management becomes sustainable: clear location structure, practical scanning habits, and steady operational gains.

If your current setup still depends on memory, spreadsheets, and workarounds, location-aware inventory management is a realistic next step.

FORMATION is Rebooting the Defence Industry

2025-05-26T00:00:00Z

We are attending AFCEA 25 tomorrow and the day after (May 27 & 28, 2025). AFCEA is the “Armed Forces Communications & Electronics Association” and with our DefenceTech focus on supporting logistics and planning, this is obviously an important conference for us.

Defence Tech is hot!

Since the beginning of the year, European NATO partners are under a lot of pressure to step up and deliver. After decades of peace time operations with occasional excursions to conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere, there is now a growing sense of urgency. And this is translating into action. Germany just announced massive budget increases for defence spending. And other countries are matching that. Order portfolios for companies in the defence industry are growing rapidly. These companies are now under a lot of pressure to deliver, deliver rapidly, and to modernize their businesses in the process.

The Ukrainian conflict feeds on donated tanks, armored vehicles, rockets, and ammunition from NATO member states. At the same time Ukraine is using and losing these at staggering rates not seen since WW II. Meanwhile, national armies have to replace and grow their own stocks of vehicles and ammunition.

The challenge

All this demand is of course fantastic news for the defence industry. But it does put them on the spot to deliver and deliver quickly. A big hurdle here is that a lot of their processes are still geared to peace time operations, slow procurement processes, and decades of budget cuts and generally not a lot of action. Rebooting this industry to step up is a non trivial task.

It requires, ramping up of production and allocating resources to do so. This includes finding people to do the work, making the most of existing production capacity, and rapidly growing this capacity to deliver as fast as possible. All this in a market that already has record employment levels.

Defence industries have to modernize their manufacturing and update their processes that haven’t been challenged in decades up to modern standards. They are too slow, too inefficient, and they are well aware. The business is there. But can they address the market? Currently they are scrambling to fix this. FORMATION is there to help.

How FORMATION is helping

Over the last three years, FORMATION has built out a successful deployment of our solution with the Bundeswehr in their vehicle maintenance facility in Jülich. With our innovative tracking solution, we’ve helped them optimise their processes and doubled their throughput, decreased time searching for parts and equipment, and improved use of space in their facilities. We’re happy to announce that this collaboration has been extended for another three and a half years. Also we are looking forward to hopefully expanding our collaboration with them.

Just like the defence tech industry is struggling to adapt, the civilian world is also struggling to adapt. Existing players in the market target civilian use cases that until recently had very little business from the defence industry. Now is not the time to enter into lengthy consulting projects, navigate the complex landscape created by procurement processes and internal bureaucracy. This could take years. Decades even.

What’s needed is companies that can be agile that can respond to your needs right now. That can quickly respond and adapt to what is needed. Agile companies like FORMATION are ideally positioned to exactly that. And we don’t do this by ourselves. At AFCEA we are there with some of our partners. Partners like Accenture who understand the industry and solutions, can bring the necessary expertise to deliver on deep integrations with e.g. SAP, security & confidentiality requirements . Partners like Cavea that we’ve worked with to deliver asset tracking for the army.

We are able to partner with companies delivering state-of-the-art tracking technologies such as Cavea and Zigpos, or bridge to existing ERP solutions via partners like Accenture.

AAS, DPP 4.0, and STANAGs

Additionally, we are ready for upcoming changes related to Digital Passport 4.0 & Asset Administration Shell that will already kick in next year. FORMATION supports these standards natively. The defence industry is facing those requirements as well. Additionally, it faces similar compliance goals coming from NATO! Standard Agreements (STANAG) are the way NATO formalizes its requirements. There are over a thousand relevant STANAGs covering everything from confidentiality labels, vehicle specifications, certificates, etc. These standards are well aligned with compliance goals our regular customers face.

The table below lists some examples of typical STANAG meta data that might apply to a Wolf vehicle (like the Bundeswehr refurbishes in Jülich)

Field name	Value	STANAG / AAS sub-model
Vehicle-architecture standard	Compliant to NATO Generic Vehicle Architecture (NGVA) v1.1	STANAG 4754 • `Vehicle-Architecture`
Security classification	NATO CONFIDENTIAL	STANAG 4774 / 4778 • `Security-Classification`
Environmental test category	Climatic Zone C1 (hot, dry)	STANAG 4370 AECTP-200 • `Environmental-Conditions`
Telemetry bus interface	NGVA CAN + Ethernet, JSON profile	STANAG 4754 • `Vehicle-Telemetry`
Maintenance data exchange	Condition-based maintenance JSON v2	STANAG 4754 • `Maintenance-Record`
Confidentiality-label binding	Label ID DE-SECRET-2025-2456	STANAG 4778 • `Security-Classification`
Operating-temperature range	–32 °C … +49 °C	STANAG 4370 • `Environmental-Conditions`
Payload interface	UCS M5 socket for tethered drone control	STANAG 4586 • `UAS-Interface`

We can bring all this data together using our easily extensible AAS meta data support to deliver, real, tangible improvements to your production processes.

What’s holding you back?

Our goal at AFCEA is to make the industry aware of our innovative solution and help them with meeting their aggressive delivery targets by helping them make the most of their existing floor space, optimise their processes. Additionally, we are looking to expand our partner network into the defence industry. Once you are ready, we can roll out a working solution in days or weeks. We’ll deliver tangible results: double digit improvements in throughput with existing staff and floor space. You’ll gain valuable insights that will help you improve your processes further. And we’ll help you build the digital infrastructure that you need right now.

What’s holding you back? Use the Zeitenwende cash to ship, not to shuffle spreadsheets. Come find us at AFCEA. We have a joint demo with our partners Accenture and Zigpos that is up and running at the Accenture booth. Come visit us. Let’s talk. Or reach out to us to learn more.

Of course you are ready for DPP 4.0 and AAS, right?!

2025-05-14T00:00:00Z

By 2026, the EU will require Digital Product Passports (DPP 4.0) for many goods and expects companies to structure product data using the Asset Administration Shell (AAS v3) model. The initial product categories — such as batteries, textiles, and electronics — are already defined, with more to follow. By 2030, the DPP requirement will apply to nearly all regulated product groups placed on the EU market, making structured, machine-readable product metadata a baseline compliance feature and industry expectation.

The main driver for this comes from the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR) , which is a central piece of the EU’s Green Deal and Circular Economy Action Plan.

Of course the implication for companies in the EU is that they should be making strategic investments in software to ready themselves for these changes. This is not only a compliance requirement, but also an opportunity for them to modernize their business and optimise their processes.

In this document, we aim to outline how FORMATION can help with this and what users can expect from us. We see this as a strategic opportunity for customers to do what they should be doing in any case - which is tracking all their goods and assets such that they can leverage data to optimise their business processes. Adding AAS support to the mix is just a sensible way to make sure that everybody in the industry speaks the same language. These requirements not only apply to you but also to your customers and suppliers. Being able to provide and consume AAS type information is going to be critical to your business.

In this article, we outline what is going to happen, how/why this matters to you, and how FORMATION can help you meet these requirements and gain valuable insights and process improvements.

What is changing?

Regulation	In Force	What It Obligates	Data Format
ESPR + DPP 4.0	First product groups 2026, all by 2030	Machine-readable “product passport” covering materials, substances of concern, repair & recycling routes	AAS sub-models in EPCIS/JSON-LD
AAS v3.0	Finalized 2024	Canonical, extensible digital twin of every asset; base for DPP records	JSON/XML/RDF schemas

Companies operating in or exporting to the EU will need to expose lifecycle, compliance, and sustainability data in standardized digital formats or risk regulatory penalties.

Common Pain Points

Metadata complexity – Lifecycle, material origin, and environmental indicators must be tracked and reported across systems and suppliers.
System integration – Legacy ERP, PLM, MES, and tracking systems rarely support AAS formats natively.
Resource constraints – Internal teams often lack the capacity or expertise to build standards-compliant infrastructure from scratch.
Process Digitalization – Not all processes are fully digitized yet and doing so requires investing in change.
Supplier onboarding – Collecting structured, standards-compliant data from suppliers remains a bottleneck, especially when they lack compatible systems.
Data provenance and traceability – Proving the origin, transformation, and compliance of materials across the supply chain is complex without shared data models like AAS.
Rapidly evolving standards – DPP and AAS specs are still shifting, so schemas and integrations need continuous updates to stay compliant.

How FORMATION Supports This Transition

Formation is adding support for selected AAS sub-models into its APIs and backend. This allows you to:

Store and propagate AAS metadata conforming to AAS where relevant. Simply using FORMATION means you are building a digital passport for your assets as you track them.
Edit AAS data directly, using Formation’s flexible custom fields feature you can easily add and support all common AAS metadata.
AAS data & Insights. Once you have this data in FORMATION, it becomes actionable and enables analysis, dashboards, and operational triggers.
Expose AAS data via APIs and integrations. Our APIs enable building integrations, exporting data, and deep integrations with other systems you use.

These features let you capture and share the data needed for DPP compliance directly within FORMATION. If you’re already using other DPP-compatible tools, FORMATION can integrate with them. Contact us to discuss integration options or plan a workshop suited to your needs.

What is AAS?

The Asset Administration Shell (AAS) is a digital representation of an asset that organizes metadata in standardized sub-models. As we explored in our Hybrid Tracking deep dive, an asset can be anything that matters in your business: equipment, supplies, goods, products, pallets, containers, nuts and bolts. What you track and at what granularity you track these assets is a business decision. Whatever you decide here, AAS supports interoperability by structuring metadata in reusable, machine-readable submodels.

This helps systems and partners exchange data consistently and reliably. Using AAS metadata ensures your is data machine-readable and complies with upcoming EU standards like the Digital Product Passport (DPP).

The clearest way to explain AAS is with a few example JSON fragments supported by the FORMATION API.

🔹 Asset Information

At the top level in AAS, you can specify meta data common to any asset. The Asset Information model specifies a wide range of fields. This sample shows how you would provide that to FORMATION via the API:

{
 "displayName": "Battery 12 V (BAT123456)",
 "specificIds": [
 { "name": "SerialNumber", "id": "BAT123456", "type": "SerialNumber" }
 ],
 "batchId": "BATCH20250322",
 "keywords": ["battery", "Li‑Ion", "12 V"],
 "properties": {
 "productionDate": "2025-03-22T00:00:00Z"
 }
}

🔹 Nameplate Submodel

Nameplate information is an important part of equipment. Often this information is engraved on a metal plate. The information you find there is of course subject to standards and rules and will include a mix of general fields like model and manufacturer and equipment/type specific fields like voltage or frequency. This information is critical to engineers and users working with or installing the equipment.

Example:

{
 "manufacturerId": "urn:epc:id:sgln:4012345.00001.0",
 "manufacturerName": "Acme Batteries GmbH",
 "model": "Li‑Ion 12 V",
 "productionBatchId": "BATCH20250322",
 "serialNumber": "BAT123456",
 "productionDate": "2025-03-22T00:00:00Z",
 "countryOfOrigin": "DE",
 "properties": {
 "powerRating": "1.5 kW",
 "voltage": "400 V",
 "frequency": "50 Hz",
 "efficiencyClass": "IE3",
 "ipClass": "IP55"
 }
}

🔹 Status Submodel

The Status Submodel provides a snapshot of the current condition and operational state of an asset. It captures key indicators such as inspection results, usage metrics, and visual evidence — all of which are essential for maintenance planning, warranty tracking, and compliance reporting.

{
 "inspectionStatus": "passed",
 "sealIntegrity": true,
 "measurements": [
 { "name": "runtimeHours", "value": 2400, "unit": "h" }
 ],
 "photoUris": [
 "https://example.com/photos/BAT123456/condition-2025-05-14.jpg"
 ],
 "properties": {
 "state": "idle",
 "lastMaintenance": "2025-04-01"
 }
}

Action Meta data

The Action Metadata submodel captures why and how a change occurred — linking lifecycle events to business context. Whenever data is added or updated in FORMATION, you can include Action Metadata to record references to business processes, current product states, and any relevant documents.

This submodel is essential for aligning with EPCIS and DPP 4.0 requirements, where changes in asset status must be traceable to supply chain events (e.g., receiving, shipping, transforming).

{
 "bizTransactionIds": {
 "deliveryNote": "DN-9834571",
 "purchaseOrder": "PO-456789"
 },
 "bizStep": "urn:epcglobal:cbv:bizstep:receiving",
 "disposition": "in_use",
 "properties": {
 "operatorId": "USR-1029",
 "location": "warehouse-A"
 }
}

Including Action Metadata on updates ensures your asset records reflect real-world operations and remain compliant with DPP and AAS expectations. This metadata travels with the asset, making downstream reporting and traceability much easier.

Future Compatibility by Design

FORMATION has a flexible and extensible data model. This is what has enabled us to add AAS metadata recently. Additionally, this also enables us to support the growing number of AAS submodels as they become relevant or important.

FORMATION is committed to staying forward-compatible with the evolving standards landscape. Our development priorities include:

Support for new and evolving AAS sub-models
Data model flexibility to accommodate future EU mandates
Maintaining clean API access so your DPP and digital twin data flows smoothly into reporting or partner systems

Unlike other platforms that lock you into a rigid schema, Formation’s infrastructure is designed to adapt as EU regulations develop.

What to Look for in a Future‑Ready Platform

Question	Why it Matters
Does the platform align with AAS v3.0 principles?	Structured, machine-readable metadata shouldn’t be an afterthought. Look for systems where asset context is already modeled and extensible — not retrofitted later.
Is metadata embedded in operational workflows?	Compliance is not just about data collection — it’s about ensuring that the right people can view, edit, and act on that data during daily operations.
Can the platform connect the physical and digital worlds?	AAS is most valuable when it reflects real-world conditions. Look for solutions that support spatial awareness, live updates, and physical triggers — not just static forms.
Are APIs and integrations open and well-documented?	You’ll need to pull AAS data into other tools or export it for reporting. Seamless access matters more than checkboxes.
Is the system built to evolve with emerging standards?	A rigid schema is a liability. A flexible data model ensures your investment keeps pace with new submodels and future DPP requirements.
Does it turn compliance into insight?	Platforms that embed data into maps, dashboards, and feedback loops help you go beyond minimum compliance toward continuous process optimisation.

Next Steps

FORMATION is ready for DPP 4.0 and AAS. Want to prepare your business for 2026 and beyond?

Book a discovery workshop — our hands-on format to assess your needs, recommend the right FORMATION modules, and align with your partners and tools.

Also, tell us about your thoughts on this. Are we covering all your needs? What else would you want in our product or APIs? How can we help you prepare for this better?

QR Codes: Shortcuts for the real world

2025-04-09T00:00:00Z

Friends, customers, and investors often refer to us as “that QR code company.” That’s not surprising—QR codes feature prominently on our website and in how we explain what FORMATION does. But the QR code is just the tip of the iceberg. What’s really interesting is what happens when you scan one. Why do we believe this matters? What problems does it solve? And what makes our approach new and valuable?

A Brief History

QR codes were invented in 1994 by Masahiro Hara, an engineer at the Japanese company Denso (a subsidiary of Toyota). Initially developed to track automotive parts during manufacturing, QR codes have since found applications in various industries worldwide. For a deeper insight into the invention and evolution of QR codes, you can watch an interview with Masahiro Hara here:

Real-World UX

Working with digital tools is already hard. On mobile phones, it can be frustrating—tiny screens, tiny buttons, and endless typing. Now imagine you’re a technician, cleaner, delivery person, or construction worker. You don’t have a desk, or even a company email address. But you do have a smartphone in your pocket.

QR codes provide the perfect shortcut: take out your phone, point it at a code, and something useful opens instantly.

Bridging Physical & Digital

A QR code is just a link — like a button for the real world. But what matters is what’s behind that button. When you scan a FORMATION QR code, you don’t just land on a generic website. You unlock a mini web page tailored to the object or location in front of you.

Such a page can include all sorts of tools and information:

Overview and general information
Rich media: photos, videos, voice memos
Cleaning checklists
Spec sheets and documentation
Maintenance history and audit logs
Contact details for the person responsible
Forms to report issues or update statuses
Links to related tools, maps, objects, or websites
Anything else you’d expect from a helpful web page — the sky’s the limit!

These aren’t just web pages—they’re contextual tools, instantly accessible to anyone with a phone. No login. No app to install. No training required. Access can be configured, and pages can be tailored to individual users when needed.

Deep Links to Things

Linking the real world with the digital world is what FORMATION does. Our system makes it easy for organizations to create, manage, and update digital twins—contextual web pages tied to physical things in their environment: rooms, doors, machines, products, equipment, you name it. Each QR code becomes a gateway to relevant, up-to-date information and actions connected to a specific object in the real world.

By bridging the gap between physical things and their digital twins, we help frontline teams stay informed, solve problems faster, and keep processes running smoothly.

No more guesswork. No more hunting for manuals or spreadsheets. Just scan, and go.

Tracking: Every Scan Is Also a Location Update

One of the things that FORMATION does—as a side effect of simply using it to access information—is build up a detailed picture of what happens where and when. Every time someone scans a QR code, we register an interaction with a specific object, in a specific place, at a specific moment. This gives organizations passive, automatic insights into their operations—without asking anyone to fill in forms or report manually.

This kind of hybrid tracking is powerful, and you can read more about it on our in-depth page here .

The magic is: tracking isn’t extra work. It’s a byproduct of connecting physical things to their digital twins. Once those twins exist, each interaction—whether it’s a technician pulling up a maintenance log, or a cleaner checking off a task—adds to a real-time understanding of what’s going on in your environment.

And when FORMATION is integrated with IoT systems, sensors, and other data sources, the effect compounds. Machine statuses, usage patterns, temperature logs, door access records—these all feed into the digital twin. Workers don’t need dashboards or training—they just scan and instantly get the right info, or the next step. The complexity stays in the background; the simplicity stays in the user’s hands.

Unlocking Operational Insights with Geofencing

2025-04-03T00:00:00Z

Why did that shipment sit idle for three days before anyone noticed? Why do tools keep going missing between shifts? The answer lies in how things move—and what you can’t see without the right tools.

The ultimate goal of tracking things is not just knowing where they are but gaining insights on how they are moving. By understanding how your goods, supplies, equipment, vehicles, parts, etc. are moving around, where they are piling up, and where they are not going at all, you can build a complete picture emerges of the processes. We call this emergent process. It’s the result of your people dealing with problems as they come up. When your planned process meets reality.

This is why FORMATION supports asset tracking. Knowing how things move around is critical to provide situational awareness to workers, providing insights to managers, and providing everybody with the tools to improve workflows and processes around them. Continuous improvement requires visibility. And our map provides this.

Geofences: Addressing on premise

To translate movement into processes, we need to add meaning to movements. A simple coordinate is meaningless. Nobody speaks latitude and longitude. But we all know how to get home, how to get to work, or to our destination when we go on vacation. All you need to know to do this is an address.

An address only gets you to the front door. What happens once you are inside? This is where geofences come in. A geofence is an area on a map. It has a boundary and things can be inside it or outside. Geofences allow us to divide up a space into meaningful sub divisions. Everything has a place in your workplace. You might have factories with halls, offices with rooms, warehouses with shelves. And you might even have subdivisions.

Everything has an address. Addresses enable you to find things easily. Everywhere that matters has a label, a number, or a code. These form the addresses to your space and they are used everywhere in your IT systems, in people’s heads. For a tracking system to be useful it has to understand your addressing.

Space and time: How it all Comes Together

FORMATION makes it effortless to map your space. Upload a floor plan, divide it up into rooms, halls, work areas. Label storage locations, shelves, etc. Once you have your space organised, we track movements between all those places inside of your workplace.

We keep track of which places things are in. When they get there, and when they leave. And we don’t forget this information. We keep it over time. Doing that allows us to map the journeys of all your key assets through your workplace, out the door to your customer, through your supply chains, and everywhere that matters across the globe.

These journeys tell a story that is the work process as it unfolds on your premises. The process emerges from the movements of things.

Why geofencing is so valuable

Spot Bottlenecks: Geofencing helps you track how long assets stay in each area, revealing hidden bottlenecks. This enables you to address delays quickly and optimise workflows, ensuring a smoother operation overall.
Enhance Resource Allocation: By understanding asset flow, you can make smarter decisions about where to allocate your resources. This ensures that every stage of the process is well-supported, improving efficiency across the board.
Automate Monitoring: Set automated alerts to flag when assets are deviating from the expected flow, or when they spend too much time in one area. This allows your team to react swiftly and keep things on track without constant oversight.
Stop Looking for Things: Searching for missing items wastes time and money. With our integrated maps and search features, you can instantly find what you need and go straight to it—no more wasting time hunting down equipment.
Self Organising: Empower your workforce by giving them a clear view of where they need to be, where the tools or items they need are, and what their next task is. This self-directed approach leads to a more efficient, proactive team.
Empowered and Happy Workers: By providing your workers with the tools they need to succeed—clear navigation, real-time data, and an intuitive workflow—you’re fostering an environment where they feel in control, motivated, and ready to perform at their best.

Use Case: Streamlining Vehicle Refurbishment with Geofencing

At the Mechatronics Center in Jülich, FORMATION’s geofencing system is used to track armored vehicle parts across a facility the size of 13 football fields. By combining QR codes and BLE beacons, each part’s movement through geofenced work zones is automatically logged — no manual input needed.

Mechanics can quickly locate parts
Management gains visibility into bottlenecks
Workflow inefficiencies become digitally traceable

Result: Increased productivity and throughput, reduced downtime, better use of floor space, and smarter process oversight.

Refer to our DefenceTech page for more details.

Get Started with FORMATION

Ready to bring clarity and control to your operations? Getting started with FORMATION is fast and frictionless:

Sign up and map your space Create your FORMATION account and build your first interactive map. Contact us to get started.
Upload your floor plan and define your zones Use our intuitive tools to mark up every area that matters—rooms, storage spaces, work zones, and more. No technical expertise required.
Order your QR code tags Our passive tracking tags let you keep tabs on anything that moves. Stick them on assets, equipment, or tools, and start tracking instantly. And when you are ready, we can level up your setup with our hybrid tracking solution.
Unlock instant value From powerful search and real-time navigation to actionable insights, FORMATION starts working for you right away—helping you streamline operations, reduce waste, and make smarter decisions.

Maps Matter: a Case for Private Maps

2025-03-26T00:00:00Z

As some maps used to say near the edges of the then known world: Hic sunt dracones - here be dragons. In today’s fast-paced world, maps are indispensable tools. Maps are everywhere — guiding us to restaurants, aiding logistics, and enhancing situational awareness.

Public maps cover the public space. Streets, roads, cities, etc. With efforts like openstreetmap, even individual trees and park benches get mapped. Germany, where FORMATION is based, takes mapping their public space very seriously and German contributors have historically dominated contributions to openstreetmap.

While public mapping services have transformed outdoor navigation, they stop at our doorstep. That’s fine when that’s your home. And that’s true for most of the world’s hundreds of millions of buildings — including many massive ones. And what about campuses, private terrain, or temporary sites? They are all represented as bland, empty shapes on a map. This is where FORMATION steps in, offering tailored mapping solutions for buildings, events, and industrial environments.

The Need for Private Mapping Solutions

Maps are more than just directional tools; they enhance user experience, improve operational efficiency, and provide critical situational awareness. In complex environments like large office buildings, factories, event venues (outdoor or indoor), campuses, intuitive maps can significantly reduce confusion, reduce time looking for things or each other, help occupants and visitors find their way, and provide situational awareness.

The challenge is that public maps don’t extend to where it matters most: where you live, work, or operate. They are great for getting you to do those places but they stop at the front door. We’re back to Here be dragons.

The lack of private maps is partially due to privacy and security concerns. Giving burglars a detailed map to where everything is in your building is not ideal. And of course there usually are some maps such as architecture drawings, fire escape plans, and sometimes even friendly visitor maps intended for signage. But these maps lack the usability, features, and convenience users expect from outdoor maps. And more importantly they don’t really do as good of a job with delivering value like outdoor maps do for us.

To address this, FORMATION offers a map that you can make your own. You control what’s on the map. The world is your map. You populate it with your buildings, sites, work areas, zones, and other areas of interest. And then you add detail: points of interest, tracked/moving assets, and whatever else is important to you. And then you share it with your colleagues, visitors, contractors, employees, and whomever you want to give access to the map. You can make the experience as inclusive or exclusive as you want. For visitors, anonymous access via QR Code is possible and an easy way to help them feel welcome. But you can limit this to specific areas in your building. The map your security staff sees is not the same map that visitors see.

Benefits of Taking Maps Private

Enhanced Security and Privacy: Private maps ensure that sensitive information about a facility’s layout and assets remains confidential, accessible only to authorized personnel.

Customized Navigation: Tailored mapping solutions can address the unique needs of a facility, offering features like indoor navigation, room booking, and fault reporting.

Operational Efficiency: With real-time data and notifications, property managers can streamline operations, quickly address building issues, and improve tenant services. The ability to track assets effortlessly using hybrid tracking , enhances efficiency, enables process optimizations, and provides great situational awareness to employees.

Improved Visitor Experience: Visitors can access maps via simple QR code scans without the need for app installations, making navigation within private premises straightforward and user-friendly.

Who is it for?

FORMATION provides maps for buildings , events , and industry . Like email, maps are for everyone. FORMATION gives you something you probably don’t have: a private map that works just like a public one—but tailored for you, your employees, and everyone who matters to your organisation.

In other words, maps are for businesses across all sectors and locations.

Are you losing time because people can’t find what they need or where to go?
Are you struggling to track equipment, goods, or other assets?
Are your premises confusing or difficult to navigate?

Maps can help.

How to get a FORMATION Map

Getting started with FORMATION is easy and is going to get even easier later in the year when we will provide the tools that we use ourselves to create your map as part of our SAAS onboarding workflow.

The process is very simple:

Set up a private FORMATION workspace. For now contact us to get one and we’ll get you started. But very soon this will be part of our self service experience.
Provide some floor plans or site maps as an image. The image needs to be to scale. We’ll georeference it onto the map. Our self service experience will include a user friendly building editor that will allow you to do this yourself.
Start mapping! Use the FORMATION tools to mark points of interest, draw navigation paths, add zones, and import content. We can help you do all this. But we just use the same tools that we provide to our users.

Get in touch to add advanced tracking, our insights dashboard, or explore how a FORMATION Map can address your needs.

Maps For Events, Buildings & Industry

2024-10-01T12:00:00Z

Half a year ago, we re-launched our website with a fresh new design and more clear content. In the half year since then we’ve worked hard on our product and sales strategy. Today, we’re re-launching our website with a focus on our complete offering.

The new website is all about maps. Maps is what FORMATION was always about. We make maps for events, buildings, and industry. Our previous website is mostly relevant to the industry segment and we are still doing that. But it isn’t all we do.

Our new website corrects this and refocuses the website on our core product: the FORMATION app. The FORMATION app is the same for all our users. It has a map with your building, event, or factory on it. Or if you are out doors, the map focuses on your activities there.

Here’s the map we did for the Berlin Mayor’s yearly Hoffest:

Visible here is a new feature that we are currently beta-testing: navigation. Navigation is useful for all our customers. It works completely without positioning, on any phone, and without any app installation. Users simple scan one of our QR Code Tags to open the maps and can find their way around your venue, event, or factory.

Go explore the new website. Give us feedback and if you like what you see, reach out to us for a demo.

FORMATION QR Code ID Check: as good as a passport.

2024-06-30T11:30:00Z

Paris is using the power of QR Codes for security during the upcoming Olympics that they are hosting. People that want to enter certain areas in Paris and close to the Olympic venues will have to show a QR Code to prove that they are allowed to be there. To get a code, people have to register and share some identification details. Enforcement will be done via checkpoints and spot inspections.

While Paris did not pick FORMATION to implement this, we do actually have QR code security built into our app. In this article we’ll show you how this works and how you might use it to do access control in your workplace.

How does it work

To control access:

Security guards may ask people to show them their verification code
The user then opens the FORMATION app on their phone and shows them the code in their profile.
The code refreshes every few seconds to reduce the opportunities for people to abuse the code.
The security guard then scans the code with the FORMATION app.
They then see the profile photo on their screen with a green check mark.
The check mark proves that the code belongs to a verified user in FORMATION.
The information in the QR code is digitally signed by FORMATION and cannot be forged.
The profile photo allows the security guard that the person showing the code is the verified person.

Use cases

Identity verification with QR Codes can be as good as a passport check. All this takes is a special flag in the user profile that can only be modified by authorized people doing a manual passport check or some other form of identity verifification. We have big plans for building out this feature to support different use cases:

Allow people to enter restricted areas.
Ticketing control for events and conferences.
Electronic locks that open for authorized users with a valid code.

Combined with a feature that allows an admin to mark user profiles for which a passport or other identity check has taken place, this can be as good as showing an actual passport. The codes are only valid for a few seconds and continuously refresh on the screen. This makes the solution resistant against the codes being copied / stolen. And the codes are impossible to forge because they are signed with a private key.

If you want to learn more about how you can secure your facilities with FORMATION, sign up and try it out.

Software is the Key Enabler for Your IoT: It’s Worthless Without It

2024-06-06T11:30:00Z

We presented FORMATION’s innovative asset tracking solution at the RFID & IoT in the Nordics 2024 conference in Copenhagen yesterday. The theme of the conference, Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC), aka. Asset Tracking or Asset Management, is central to our mission. But why is this such a hot topic? And what is a software company like ours doing at such a conference?

Asset tracking is revolutionizing workplaces around the globe. Knowing where things are removes uncertainty and allows for significant efficiency gains. As the conference organizers highlighted, optimising efficiency is crucial for sustainability. Improved efficiency leads to better resource use, such as energy, and reduces CO2 emissions and improves energy efficiency.

FORMATION’s Unique Approach

One key insight we’ve had for a while is that asset tracking can be hardware-intensive and therefore expensive. As a software company, FORMATION doesn’t make or sell hardware. Our approach to addressing this cost issue is to make hardware optional—we support it, but we don’t require it. To maximize the value of tracking, it’s vital to track as much as you can. Every box, nut, bolt, pallet, brick, tool, vehicle, machine, etc. counts! Using hardware tracking solutions alone can quickly become prohibitively expensive.

Hybrid Tracking

Our solution to this problem is hybrid tracking. Hybrid tracking enables you to track everything that matters using QR Codes and Bar Codes. QR Code Tags provide a cheap, super scalable baseline. Additionally, we support hardware to enhance convenience, accuracy, frequency, and reliability for tracking key assets. This means you can track the same assets with expensive IoT in your factory and use QR Code tags when they move outside. Hybrid tracking works everywhere: inside your factories, on the road, on the oceans during shipping, at your customers’ locations, or wherever else you care to track your assets. Hybrid tracking gives you the best of both worlds—use advanced IoT where it makes sense and QR Code Tags for everything else. The important part is tracking as much as you can.

Industry Partnerships and Integration

We partner with the best companies in the industry to deliver hardware-based asset tracking and other solutions. And of course, we made some new friends at the conference. If it speaks coordinates, we can integrate it. In fact, we are not limited to just X, Y (and Z); we can also integrate sensor readings, metadata from RFIDs, ERP systems, and whatever else you have. Maximizing the value these solutions requires good software. And that’s what we specialize in. We add value by adding our spatial software on top of your hardware and IOT.

Try it out!

Curious to see how this works? Try it out and use our handy new onboarding tour to learn how to track your assets.

The cost of Tracking Is Holding Back Your Business

2024-05-29T05:01:00Z

Traditional asset tracking methods are failing modern businesses because they cost too much. The high cost stops companies from tracking their assets effectively and forces them to limit tracking to just a handful of assets. This leads to inefficiencies and increased costs. At FORMATION, we offer a scalable, cost-effective solution that can revolutionize your asset management. But why is asset tracking so crucial, and how can it benefit your business?

What is asset tracking?

Assets are things that are in some way valuable or important to companies. You can think of tools, goods, products, equipment, vehicles, materials, etc. Asset tracking is simply the process of keeping track of where assets are. There are many different ways to do this of course and most companies do at least some minimal form of keeping track of their assets for bookkeeping, inventory management, compliance, and other business reasons. Traditionally this means keeping a record of where things are stored in terms of shelf numbers, storage rooms and halls, etc. and making sure those records are kept up to date.

Modern technology enables more efficient, lower cost, and more convenient ways of keeping track of assets. This vastly increases the scale and frequency of tracking. You can track many more things more often. But why would you do that?

Why Asset Tracking is Valuable

More effective asset tracking means you are gathering more data and this is essential for improving operational efficiency and reducing costs. Many companies do not track their assets effectively. They often use cumbersome and outdated paper-based methods and other ad-hoc methods. This leads to inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date information. This lack of effective tracking can lead to significant time and resource wastage.

FORMATION’s asset tracking provides several benefits:

Search Efficiency: Quickly locating tools and goods; reduce downtime and increase productivity. Waste less time finding things.
Operational Insights: Identify process bottlenecks and optimise your workflow using visual heatmaps, insights from dashboards, and asset tracking trails on the map.
Knowledge Sharing: Share information about what you are tracking; access rich media, notes, photos, and other documentation.
Situational Awareness: The FORMATION map increases situation awareness in your team. They can see at a glance where to go, what needs doing, and where the action is. This is also perfect for onboarding new people, or making your people more productive in unfamiliar environments.
Accountability and Auditing: Access detailed logs about your assets. Where has it been, who handled it, etc. Auditing logs enable you to diagnose when things go wrong, allow you to take corrective action earlier, and reduces cost for providing critical information needed for legal or business compliance.

Cost-effective tracking

Different tracking technologies offer varying levels of accuracy, update frequency, and cost. They each have their pros and cons. The pyramid above illustrates that QR Code Tags are the most scalable way to track assets, by far. For the price of a simple printed QR Code, you can tag & track anything anywhere in the world. This requires no new infrastructure, it can be done with a simple smart-phone, it doesn’t even require any software installation. Anyone can track anything with QR codes.

The further up you go in the pyramid, the more expensive and complicated it gets. And while the position accuracy improves, you also get some limitations. For example, you need to have infrastructure in your facilities to support tracking. And the trackers don’t work if you go out of range of that infrastructure. Some trackers are powered and require a battery that runs out. Depending on the type of tracker, the trackers can also be costly. And like with all hardware, maintenance is required, there are numerous challenges in this space.

This upfront friction stops a lot of asset tracking projects dead in their tracks. Companies opt out of expensive tracking technologies that they can’t afford or limit their use to only a handful of assets, which defeats the purpose.

But what about everything else? Why track only a few hundred assets when you have millions? Our key point is that you should be tracking everything everywhere to the best of your abilities to get the most value out of asset tracking. Don’t allow yourself to be limited by expensive tracking technology.

The FORMATION approach is to not force our customers into making upfront expensive choices. You can sign up now, get started and be tracking all your assets. This puts you in a position to then add other tracking solutions as needed where and when it makes sense to do so. With FORMATION, you can always use QR Code Tags. As many as you need. Our supply is infinite. If it matters to you, we’ll track it for you.

Once you are tracking your assets, are getting the value, and you want to level up your experience, we support a variety of technologies from the pyramid above via plugins. You can use this to get better accuracy and automated tracking for some of your assets. But for everything else, QR Code Tags provide you a baseline that you currently don’t have.

FORMATION & Defence Tech - Read about our solutions for DefenceTech.
Hybrid Tracking - “Learn how we combine QR codes, IoT, and GPS for seamless asset tracking, indoors and outdoors.

Discover the benefits of asset tracking and sign up now .

Using Retrieval Augmented Generation to Enhance Spatial Queries in FORMATION Asset Tracking

2024-04-30T14:00:00Z

We recently had the pleasure of hosting another CIEE intern, Ratul Pradhan . During February and March we tasked him with an open question: can we use AI to unlock data in FORMATION’s software platform such that we can enable our customers to ask questions of using a simple chat bot? Ratul did not disappoint.

The Challenge

FORMATION is an asset tracking solution that allows workers to keep track of things in the workplace. By tracking assets and annotating information on objects with photos, comments, keywords, etc. workers are able to share and document a lot of information about important objects and features of the workplace. We use a traditional search engine to unlock this information for workers on a map. However, we had a hunch that we should be able to do more with this wealth of information.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT , and similar chat bots by others such as Google’s Gemini and Twitter/X’s Grok enable users to ask questions via a chat. These products are powered by a family of AIs called Large Language Models (LLMs). These AI models are able to interpret written text, images, or even spoken text and come up with a good answer.

However, while such models know a lot about the combined wealth in the form of the content of the public internet, they know nothing about the data that we have in our app. Our customers use FORMATION to track assets in the workplace and they also create tasks and points on the FORMATION map. This provides us with rich data on what is happening in the workplace.

Technical Implementation

To answer questions about this data, an LLM would have to know about this data somehow. To enable this, we decided to use Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) . This is a technique that makes it possible to ask questions about things that these models don’t know about and haven’t been trained on. RAG works by first doing a search against a database with your data and then using the retrieved results to add these to the context provided to the chat bot. The retrieved results are used to augment the information given to the chatbot. The chatbot can then look at the search results and construct an answer.

The primary goal of this project was to find out if we can use LLMs and RAG to query our data and get reasonably good answers. An additional goal was to do this using self-hosted, open source models and services so that we can avoid sending our customer data to third parties. This is of course important to our customers as what happens in their workplaces is highly confidential.

After some experimentation, we settled on Llama2 and Gemma . These are two popular open source LLMs that developers can download and use on their laptop. While not as powerful as the closed source alternatives available from OpenAI, Google, and others, these models are still good enough to be useful in combination with RAG.

To create a demo, Ratul used Langchain , which is a popular tool to experiment with LLMs and RAG. A considerable challenge was transforming the structured data that we have in FORMATION into a form where we could insert it into a vector database. Vector databases are commonly used to implement semantic search and as such a popular tool to use with RAG. They work by calculating embeddings (vectors) that capture the meaning of text or images using an AI model. These vectors are then stored in the database. When loo king up things from the database a semantic vector is calculated for the query which is then used to find semantically similar things in the database. Langchain makes it really easy to experiment with different models for calculating these semantic vectors and tuning how the retrieval part of rag works.

There are of course a lot of challenges with this. A lot of the models are designed to interpret human text and not structured data. Additionally, some of these models tend to have only a limited vocabulary and ignore semantically relevant things outside of this vocabulary. This limits their understanding of data. The trade off here usually is model and vector size. Where bigger, computationally more expensive models and vectors may yield better results.

After some tinkering, Ratul managed to line everything up and we were able to get some answers from our data. Questions like: “Given that I’m on the third floor of the Ahoy building, where would I go if I’m hungry”. Ahoy here is the co-working space that we are in. And we managed to get the satisfying answer stating that there is a cantine on the second floor.

Conclusions

Like all good research, this project raises a lot of questions and potential follow ups. Also, this is by no means ready to be delivered to our customers. For example, these open source LLMs still have a lot of issues with hallucinating answers. Additionally, the model we used for calculating embeddings has a lot of limitations. It has a limited vocabulary and there are some challenges to make it understand spatial information, for example. This limits what we can ask and makes it tricky for an LLM to provide good answers. To address this, we’d have to work on improving RAG querying.

However, we do see a credible path to doing more with these technologies and are very excited about the possibilities that are unlocked by these new technologies. We are planning to continue to experiment with this and hope to eventually be able to productize this so we can provide valuable insights to our customers and make our product even more useful to them.

Also, we are looking forward to our next batch of interns who will be joining us over the summer for some more experimentation. If you are interested in joining our mission, reach out to us and keep an eye on our open positions page. We regularly host interns via a variety of international exchange programmes.

The dark art of aligning indoor and outdoor maps

2024-04-19T13:00:00Z

In setting up a high precision positioning system recently with one of our partners, we noticed something odd. We got some really precise measurements of a beacon moving through a building. However, the path the beacon followed went through a wall. Our map was obviously wrong! Of course this is not the first time we have encountered issues like this but we think it’s important to make people aware that this can be an issue and that they understand why that is an issue. And finally, we of course also provide a way to address the issues.

About indoor mapping

At FORMATION we provide hybrid indoor and outdoor maps. We carefully position our indoor maps for buildings on top of the outdoor map by rotating and scaling the bitmap of the indoor map until the walls align with the underlying building polygon. This is a process that is usually referred to as georeferencing.

Getting good indoor maps is tricky. Usually we get these in the form of architectural drawings, fire escape plans, and similar sources of maps. These maps are not very usable for the general public as there is a lot of clutter on the map depending on the intended use of the map. However, our designers can usually produce a nicer map from this. The point of course is that both architectural drawings and fire escape plans are to scale and have to be very precise. In theory, if we precisely align those maps with buildings on the outdoor map, we should end up with a very accurate map.

If you’ve read our white paper from a few years ago on the Misconceptions of Mapping , you may recall the problem here: georefencing relies on the underlying map being accurate. And maps just are not that accurate.

Just how inaccurate are Maps?

To illustrate how inaccurate maps can be, we decided to do a little experiment. For this we used some of the most popular maps: Openstreet maps, Google Maps, Here Maps, and Apple maps to look up the exact coordinates for a few reference points. And then we calculated the distances between the reference points on these maps.

Ahoy! Berlin NW Building Corner in Berlin

Ahoy Berlin is the coworking space where FORMATION is currently based. As a reference point, we simply picked the north west corner of the building. Each of the maps have a building outline for the building so this simply used the map UI to figure out the coordinate of that corner.

Provider 1	Point	Provider 2	Point	Distance (meters)
Osm	52.5415, 13.38982	Google	52.54151054, 13.38980753	1.44
Osm	52.5415, 13.38982	Here	52.5415063, 13.3898182	0.71
Osm	52.5415, 13.38982	Apple	52.541497, 13.389822	0.36
Google	52.54151054, 13.38980753	Here	52.5415063, 13.3898182	0.86
Google	52.54151054, 13.38980753	Apple	52.541497, 13.389822	1.8
Here	52.5415063, 13.3898182	Apple	52.541497, 13.389822	1.07

Review on geojson.io

Siegessäule Centroid

The Siegessäule (Victory Column) is a big monument in Berlin. It looks a bit like a map pin and it’s circular. So, I used the centre as a reference point.

Provider 1	Point	Provider 2	Point	Distance (meters)
Osm	52.5145, 13.35012	Google	52.51451225, 13.35010045	1.9
Osm	52.5145, 13.35012	Here	52.51451451, 13.35009727	2.23
Osm	52.5145, 13.35012	Apple	52.514524, 13.350096	3.12
Google	52.51451225, 13.35010045	Here	52.51451451, 13.35009727	0.33
Google	52.51451225, 13.35010045	Apple	52.514524, 13.350096	1.34
Here	52.51451451, 13.35009727	Apple	52.514524, 13.350096	1.06

Review on geojson.io

Galeria Kaufhof SW corner

Galeria Kaufhof is a popular warehouse close to another map pin shaped object, Berlin’s TV Tower. Since that is quite big and circular it’s a bit harder to pick a precise point. So, we settled for a corner of the nearby building instead which is the south west corner of the building.

Provider 1	Point	Provider 2	Point	Distance (meters)
Osm	52.52185, 13.41171	Google	52.52184966, 13.41172234	0.84
Osm	52.52185, 13.41171	Here	52.52184025, 13.41166405	3.29
Osm	52.52185, 13.41171	Apple	52.521853, 13.411718	0.64
Google	52.52184966, 13.41172234	Here	52.52184025, 13.41166405	4.08
Google	52.52184966, 13.41172234	Apple	52.521853, 13.411718	0.47
Here	52.52184025, 13.41166405	Apple	52.521853, 13.411718	3.92

Review on geojson.io

Lessons learned

We only sampled a few points here and of course and our sampling wasn’t super precise either. But the pattern is very clear: the various providers disagree on where things are by up to a few meters. It’s not that the maps are wrong, it’s just that they have slightly different interpretations of where things are.

Why outdoor maps are so inaccurate

To create an outdoor map, map providers that exist today are using a wide variety of data. They use satellite imagery, they use photos taken from planes, and in some cases they may use information from government sources about where buildings and roads are. Additionally they make use of GPS samplings from phones or dedicated devices. Aligning these data sources with each other and with the standardized WGS 84 coordinate system is part of this and different map providers make different choices here. The core issue here is that this is not a very precise process.

First of all there is the issue that the world is not a perfect sphere. To counter that, there are various coordinate systems that try to model the world as an imperfect sphere using elipsoid curves. The most common standard that most people use these days for this is WGS 84 , which is the set of ellipsoids that smart phones use and satellite systems such as GPS, Galileo, etc. WGS 84 standardizes these curves using a few parameters in the form of high precision numbers. But of course this is a simplication. In practice you get a level of accuracy that matches the differences we have seen in our little experiment of up to a few meters.

A second issue is that map providers don’t use the same data. They each use a combination of sattelite and aearial photography, ground measurements (e.g. with cars and lidar), and in some cases manual measurements. Georeferencing that is not an exact science of course and you have to deal with parallax, perspective issues, lens distortions and other sources of small mistakes. Finally, they each use their own algorithms to figure out things like building outlines, roads, etc. Altogether, this adds up to these map providers disagreeing about where things are.

And finally, satellite positioning is not that precise either. GPS has an accuracy that is very dependent on satellite visibility and amount. Under the best of circumstances, you might get about five meters accuracy. But in dense cities without direct lines of sight, it can be worse than that.

It’s all relative

In the end, fixing the problem we had with our positioning partner was easy. We simply shifted our map by about 1.5 meter to align our mutual versions of the indoor map in the same way and suddenly the path made a lot more sense. Unfortunately it does mean that our indoor map does not align perfectly with the underlying outdoor map. But that is a small sacrifice as the more important thing is aligning indoor maps and the tracking system so people don’t crash into walls.

We hope to see improved collaboration between various map providers may lead to less disagreement between outdoor maps. The recent announcement by the Overture Maps foundation is an important step. It’s the first time that a group of companies works together on a broad data set that includes building outlines, and many other map features. Maybe, the other map providers might start agreeing more on where things are.

Providing a good hybrid indoor outdoor map is increasingly important as positioning systems are getting more accurate. GPS is more than 40 years old at this point. And some positioning systems are providing one or two orders of magnitude improvements over that. Going from 5 meters to less than 5 cm accuracy requires that we improve our maps. Most outdoor maps don’t even have features sized smaller than a few meters.

Augmenting Reality with FORMATION

2024-04-05T09:00:00Z

Augmented Reality (AR) is getting a lot of attention with the recent launch of Apple’s Vision Pro and Meta’s affordable Quest 3 product. We have been keeping an eye on this space because of the potential in the context of our product.

The FORMATION app as it exists today is a map-based product that helps workers find their way in their workplace. It shows a lot of information on a map that is precisely geo-positioned on a 2D map. We also have support for buildings and floors, which enables using FORMATION indoors and outdoors. Of course the information we put on a map could also be super interesting in an augmented reality setting. We often talk about using the map as a lens to information. You could think of this as a simplistic form of AR. But imagine replacing the map with augmented reality—what possibilities would that unlock?

This was the question that we were looking to answer last year via two research projects.

HoloLens AR demo with Th Wildau

The first project we did with our friends at TH Wildau. We’ve been working with them in a few projects for several years. Last year, they built a demo application for Microsoft’s Hololens platform that allows users to complete tasks in FORMATION while wearing AR goggles.

Lars Schymik from TH Wildau created a short video that shows off the capabilities that AR offers. Particularly exciting for us is the concept of interacting with a QR Code tag simply by touching them with your finger. The AR goggles have a camera and when you wear them, QR Code tags become buttons that you can walk up to and press. And of course the general situational awareness is very useful too.

Also very interesting in his prototype is how the system keeps track of where you are and shares your position to FORMATION: we can use hololens to track the position of the user in real time. The waypoints that Lars is following, are created in FORMATION as regular points. You can see Lars walking through our office with the FORMATION app open in the AR view as well as a screen capture of FORMATION running on a laptop. As Lars walks around, the system tracks him and he checks off the waypoints until he reaches his destination. At the destination, he then interacts with the coffee machine to open a FORMATION task and completes it.

Visit the TH Wildau project page here .

Web AR demo

A second project we kicked off last summer was about coming up with an AR experience that doesn’t require special hardware. A few years ago, Pokémon-Go captured the imagination of millions of kids (and some adults) that were hunting Pokémon monsters with their smart phones. Simply by looking through the camera view of their phones, they can see tha augmented world with monsters and catch them.

This inspired us to see if we could replicate that experience with FORMATION. For this, we collaborated with two interns from CIEE . We gave them the task to create a prototype application using Web AR. Web AR is a standard that allows you to build Pokemon Go style applications where you can project simple objects in a 3D in the camera view.

Our two summer interns, Athena Rapinan and Donovan Rimer , worked on this for several weeks to overcome some challenges and managed to pull off a demo that’s very similar to what we did with HoloLens. Except it runs on a regular smart phone and does not require any special hardware.

The future of work

The future of work is here. Of course, the current generation of AR goggles is still a combination of too clumsy and awkward for daily use. They are big and clunky and the battery usage limits how long you can use them. However, as you can see from these two demos, the potential is there. And with Web AR, we might not even need any goggles. Access information and tasks about everything around you simply by walking around and interacting with things. We are very excited about the future. We’re looking forward to doing more things with AR in the future.

FORMATION website refresh

2024-03-12T09:00:00Z

FORMATION has a new website! With the help of H23 , a Finnish design agency headed by friend of our company Miiro Seppänen, we’ve completely redesigned the FORMATION website. The new design focuses on delivering our core message: “track any asset”.

The new design has a few nice features, including a dark and light mode design, super fast page loads, lots of subtle transitions and animations. Our goal with this is to more clearly position FORMATION as a SAAS business. With clear calls to action, messaging, and by doubling down on the core values of our product, we will take FORMATION to the next level.

The project started last year when we met Miiro when he visited Berlin. Many video calls followed and we got busy getting our messaging right. This is of course critical for a good design. Lorem ipsum does not inspire designers the same way as the real message.

Special thanks to Miiro and his team as well as Bernard van der Weest who helped with the initial transition of Miiro’s Figma designs to HTML.

How we built our website

This is how we built our website:

The website was designed in Figma.
We retired wordpress in favor of a static site generator called Hugo . This is a richly featured software package that helps us build a so-called static website. We used and adapted Hugoplate , which is an opinionated take on various other bits and bobs needed to build a hugo based website. This saved us a lot of time.
The website is styled using Tailwind CSS , which is something we are also hoping to bring to our product.
The files of our website are hosted in our Google cloud platform via their CDN (Content Delivery Network). Using a CDN means that the site downloads quickly wherever you are in the world via one of Google’s local data centres.

Wirepas: Asset tracking in large sites – not a problem

2024-03-08T09:00:00Z

Our friends at Wirepas have published an article on their website about our successful deployment with the Bundeswehr in Jülich.

We’ve been running FORMATION in Jülich since 2022. Last year we added bluetooth trackers to the setup with our partner Cavea . With their trackers and our QR codes, workers can easily access information about parts in the workplace. The bluetooth trackers report their location to FORMATION and this updates the location of parts as they are moving through the factory.

As the article highlights, the site in Jülich presented some major challenges for setting this up. It’s a very large site and bluetooth only has a range of about 10-20 meters. Additionally, the use of heavy machinery and metal features of the building add more challenges. To overcome these, Cavea’s anchors uses mesh networking provided by Wirepas . The anchors provide coverage for all the important areas on the site. Because the anchors are wireless, installing them was straightforward.

However, the site is so huge that this still leaves some areas that aren’t covered and for this the army continues to use FORMATION’s QR code tracking. QR code tags allow users to update the location of an asset by simply scanning the object’s QR code with their phone. This hybrid tracking also allows them to track assets that don’t have a beacon attached to them.

As the article notes, the combined setup has massively improved the process in Jülich:

… This has increased productivity in the workshop. Downtimes within processes are digitally visible thanks to the position data. And not only the mechanics involved but also the management benefits from tracking the modules. Because the solution increases transparency in processing times, the potential for improvement can be identified.

As we shared last year, the Cyber Innovation Hub is also very positive about this project:

Want to learn more about how FORMATION can help you tack any asset? Reach out and we’ll set up a call!

FORMATION & Defence Tech - Read about our solutions for DefenceTech.
Hybrid Tracking - “Learn how we combine QR codes, IoT, and GPS for seamless asset tracking, indoors and outdoors.

Cyber Innovation Hub publishes a video about FORMATION

2023-06-21T09:00:00Z

Today, the Cyber Innovation Hub published a video on our joint project. Together, we’ve been running a project in Jülich where the Bundeswehr operates a vehicle maintenance facility. They use FORMATION to track vehicle parts across the vast premises and keep track of where things are.

CiH’s Christoph Ritschel:

Assembly tracking… 📱 🔩🔧It was a wild ride and not easy to implement the whole thing in such a short time in compliance with the requirements, especially the IT security and data protection of the Bundeswehr. Therefore, I am personally all the more pleased about the many positive feedbacks and the impact that “Assembly Tracking” has in the Mechatronics Center.

The 7 Misconceptions of Mapping

2020-12-07T09:00:00Z

Download our whitepaper: The 7 Misconceptions of Mapping .

Most of us use some kind of location technology everyday. We depend on it navigating to new places, finding good restaurants, shops or local services, using the most efficient public transport or even driving a better route avoiding traffic. It’s so popular that today the majority of smartphones have hardware features enabling reliable positioning. And now the popularity of Location Based Services (LBS) in our personal life is also impacting professional applications. Businesses around the world are making their work more efficient by adopting positioning technologies. There are a lot of great examples of really smart solutions optimising workflows, providing better customer experience, increasing safety measures or giving better process control in some sectors like logistics, aviation, etc.

However, most industry sectors have yet to fully leverage location based services. Part of the reason is that a lot of business takes place in environments that are either poorly mapped, indoors, or otherwise hard to navigate with off the shelf maps and positioning technology.

Indoor location based systems have been in the market for over ten years now but use cases for these are so far limited to very specific industry sectors like e.g. logistics. We believe that commoditization of technology and software stacks in this space is about to change this and that this will unlock new use cases and will enable everyone to benefit from this great tech- nology.

When testing the waters with our early customers and pilots we noticed that people tend to have a set of pre-conceptions, expectations and assumptions about what that will mean for them based on their experience with consumer location based services.

This whitepaper explores this topic by challenging some of the common misconceptions you may experience and opening your eyes to the great potential of this technology . We believe location technology is going to be of great importance for businesses across essentially all sectors and are excited about helping you understand how you can integrate this into your business, improve the way you work, and mobilize your workforce.

Download our whitepaper: The 7 Misconceptions of Mapping .