Real-time positioning company establishes base in Greenville.

Samsung's plant floor may seem to be a world away from the barn of a dairy farm in Belgium.

But maybe they aren't that different after all.

Both use an ultra-wide band real-time locating system from a company that has just made its first North American base in Greenville.

Both collect data from tagged essentials in their production process whether heifers or quality control tools and show where they are at any given time, as well as any patterns that arise over time.

For example, according to Yves Ghys, managing director and CCO of Pozyx's North American office, a farmer using his Pozyx real-time tracking system and data collection program can be alerted if a certain cow shows abnormal behavior which would need attention - all automatically and remotely, without even having to visit the barn.

Sick heifers may stray from the watering or food trough or have a tendency to remain apart from the herd over time.

On the factory floor, Pozyx has been used to unsnare bottlenecks in internal processes, alter inefficient lead times, calculate production costs, find misplaced tools and reveal the source of sluggish workflow, among other solutions. Including the monitoring of social distancing: an alarm alerts technicians on the floor when they come within six feet of a coworker.

"That would allow you, instead of just thinking out a price, to see exactly how much time is spent on what product and what is the time to deliver it to your end customer, meaning that if some of your customers would ask you to do a specialty, you could tell them exactly how much extra time that it would take to create it and how much the price would be to manufacture the product, " Ghys said.

At Bonduelle, a produce processor and distributor in Italy, Pozyx's locating system helped streamline production by 3%, according to Ghys. This saved the company hundreds of hours per warehouse per year, mostly by pinpointing misplaced pallets.

Pozyx collects the data and Gemba Solutions' software crunches the numbers into "smart manufacturing" integration services. The symbiotic relationship between the two companies is one reason Pozyx has set up shop at the Merovan Business Center on 1200 Woodruff Road.

Gemba Systems first moved to Greenville from Delaware in 2018. The company's super computer or "Gateway," as Ghys calls it, receives data from Pozyx's collection tools, called "tags" and "anchors," and prepares it for analysis.

"From our offices in Greenville, SC, we are very focused on...