Toulouse, France
Final wing assembly
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Application
How one logistics manager regained control of the custom-built jigs, stillages and tooling — some worth €50K–€250K, all unique to a specific build — moving across four factories in three countries. When one goes missing, it isn’t just an asset lost; it’s a production line at risk.
Custom-built wing jigs worth €50,000–€250,000 vanish between factories. A specialized tool can’t be found, and an assembly bay waits. Logistics teams still run the show on phone calls, emails and shared spreadsheets — while every hour of delay ripples downstream.
The supply chain is still playing a challenging game of whack-a-mole. Production rates are held back not by lack of demand, but by a systematic inability to see, plan and coordinate the flow of parts, materials and assets across a fragmented multi-tier supply chain.
Aerospace production doesn't stall because assets go missing. It stalls because of the chain of consequences when assets can't be seen. Sensolus closes that visibility gap on four fronts.
Reduce the need for safety stock by knowing exactly where every jig and container is at all times.
Gain visibility into dwell times, cycle times and bottlenecks at supplier sites.
Automated alerts when something deviates, so you catch problems before they cascade downstream.
Replace phone calls, spreadsheets and manual check-ins with automated tracking and notifications.
While being accurate, quick to deploy and energy-saving, it works great! The logistics data flow has significantly increased, providing more visibility on daily operations.
What manufacturers typically gain with Sensolus
Claire heads production logistics at AeroWing*, a European aerospace manufacturer specialising in aircraft wing assemblies. Her team coordinates jigs, tooling and returnable transport items across four factories in three countries — and until recently, she’d start most mornings on the phone, chasing a jig someone else had last seen.
Each custom-built wing jig is worth between €50,000 and €250,000. When one goes missing, it isn’t just an asset lost — it’s a production line at risk. Multiply that across 667 tracked assets in constant motion, and the case for real-time visibility makes itself.
*AeroWing is a fictional use case created using an aggregation of data from multiple Sensolus customers in the aerospace sector.
Leading edges from Bremen, wing skins from Broughton, center boxes from Nantes — all converging on final assembly in Toulouse. Smart trackers follow every jig end-to-end.
Smart tracker switches to transit mode. GPS every 15 minutes. Claire gets an automatic departure notification.
Follow the journey on the map. Data recovery fills connectivity gaps for near-100% continuity.
Jig enters the geozone. Transit time calculated. Assembly team notified automatically — no phone call, no email.
Tracker switches to stationary mode. Dwell averages 2.8 days. Indoor tools located by BLE in under 5 minutes.
Jig departs, cycle repeats. The platform builds a full picture of cycle times, utilization and routing — to right-size the asset pool.
Claire's supply chain spans four production sites across Europe. Each handles a different stage of the wing build, and assets flow between them constantly. Until recently, there was no reliable way to know where they were.
Final wing assembly
Leading edge manufacturing
Wing skin panel production
Center wing box fabrication
Claire's team mapped every asset type to the right tracking approach. Large assets that move between sites get a smart tracker with GPS; smaller tools that stay within a facility get a compact location tag for indoor visibility. One platform, one view of everything, everywhere.
| Asset type | Quantity | Tracker | Update frequency | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wing assembly jigs | 32 | Smart tracker | Every 15 min in transit | Cross-border journey tracking, dwell & cycle time |
| Component stillages | 180 | Smart tracker | Every 30 min in transit | RTI pool management, location, utilization |
| Specialized crates | 95 | Smart tracker | Every 30 min in transit | Transit visibility, loss prevention |
| Calibration tools | 240 | Location tag | Continuous (BLE) | Indoor zone-level location, theft protection |
| Torque wrenches | 120 | Smart tracker | Continuous (BLE) | Tool crib management, certification tracking |
Cross-border jig tracking solved one half of the problem. The other half was inside the factory walls. At Toulouse final assembly alone, 360 calibration tools and torque wrenches would regularly go misplaced in a 40,000 m² facility. Not stolen — just lost.
Claire’s team fitted each tool with a compact location tag and installed four smart gateways at key zones: the tool crib, assembly line A, assembly line B and the calibration lab. When a production engineer urgently needs a specific calibration tool, they open the platform, see it was last detected in the calibration lab four minutes ago, and walk straight to it. What used to be a 30–45 minute scavenger hunt is now a 5-minute task.
Claire used to start her mornings on phone calls. Now, the Sensolus platform does the heavy lifting — generating automatic alerts on configurable rules, so her team only acts when something actually needs acting on.
Automatic notification when a jig arrives at or departs from any production site. Confirms delivery without manual check-in.
Alert when a jig sits at a site longer than the 4-day target, flagging potential bottlenecks in the production schedule.
If a jig appears at an unrecognized location or deviates from the expected corridor, the team is alerted to investigate immediately.
High-value tools crossing a restricted perimeter without authorization trigger an immediate alert, with the location trail preserved for investigation.
Same story, different lens — how Claire's transformation shows up in the day-to-day.
Illustrative outcomes — AeroWing is a fictional customer composite drawn from multiple Sensolus aerospace deployments.
Infrastructure-free deployment. End-to-end security. A decade of battery life. Everything else flows from these three.
Self-contained trackers work indoors and outdoors with no gateways, no wiring and no factory-floor changes. Deploy a proof of concept in days, not months — a critical edge in aerospace environments where every modification is complex and costly.
Data security, device security and supply-chain security — built in, not bolted on. The hardened architecture aerospace programs demand, from the tracker on the jig to the cloud platform your team signs into.
5–10 years of battery life per tracker. No charging stations, no swap-out cycles, no maintenance overhead — just assets that keep reporting for the lifespan of the program.
The questions aerospace production, logistics and operations leaders ask us most when they start evaluating asset visibility.
No. Sensolus trackers work out of the box over public low-power cellular and GPS networks — no gateways, no receivers, no wiring, and no changes to your sites or your suppliers’ IT. A custom jig can leave a German supplier, cross into France, and arrive at your final assembly hall in Toulouse without anyone touching infrastructure along the way.
Inside assembly halls, Sensolus Bluetooth (BLE) location tags are picked up by smart gateways positioned in the building — or by existing third-party devices that act as a smart gateway, such as a handheld RFID reader.
Our trackers operate across European and international cellular networks and switch automatically as an asset moves across borders. Journey data stays continuous — no SIM swaps, no dead zones at the border, no separate contracts per country. Data recovery fills short connectivity gaps so every cross-border leg reaches near-100% continuity, even on routes through remote areas.
Yes. Outdoors and in transit, assets are located via GPS. Indoors — for example inside a 40,000 m² final-assembly hall — Sensolus location tags use Bluetooth (BLE) and are detected by smart gateways placed in the building. Operators can find a specific jig, stillage or calibration tool in under five minutes instead of 30–45 minutes of manual searching.
Sensolus trackers are engineered for 5–10 years of battery life under typical aerospace asset cycles, depending on configuration and reporting frequency. That’s longer than the working life of most custom jigs and returnable transport items. There are no charging stations, no swap-out cycles, and no maintenance overhead — trackers are fit-and-forget for the lifespan of the program.
Yes. Sensolus exposes location, journey, dwell-time and cycle-time data through a REST API and can stream events to your ERP, MES, or supply-chain platform. Customers typically pipe real-time asset state into tools like SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Odoo, or a custom planning system so asset visibility shows up where planners and production schedulers already work.
Deployments are typically live within weeks, not months, because there’s no site infrastructure to install or approve. Visibility benefits — knowing where every jig is, catching missing assets early, ending the phone-call logistics — appear from day one.
Cost and buffer-stock reductions build over the first 6–12 months as teams use cycle-time and dwell-time data to right-size the asset pool. Industry benchmarks point to up to -80% fewer lost assets over that horizon.
Security runs end-to-end: hardened device firmware, secure data transmission from tracker to cloud, and role-based access control in the platform so only the right users see sensitive program data. Architecture and security practices are designed to meet the expectations of aerospace programs and their compliance obligations.
Whether you're managing 30 jigs or 3,000 containers — let's talk about what visibility could look like for your production network.
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