3PL Operator Cuts Forklift Near-Miss Incidents 60% with BLE-Based Safety System at a Fraction of UWB Cost

Two near-misses and one OSHA injury drove insurance premiums up – but UWB safety systems cost $2.1M per site

The client operates 11 fulfillment centers across North America, each averaging 38,000 m² of warehouse floor. Their fleet: 240 forklifts, 1,800 roll cages, and thousands of pallets moving through e-commerce and grocery fulfillment operations.

In 2024, two pedestrian-forklift near-miss incidents and one OSHA-reportable injury put the operation under scrutiny. Insurance premiums spiked. The workers’ comp carrier demanded evidence of safety investments. And operations leadership knew it was only a matter of time before a near-miss became a fatality.

They needed two things: an anti-collision system that alerts forklift drivers when pedestrians enter a 4-meter danger zone, and real-time location of assets – roll cages, pallets, tuggers – that were disappearing into the facility’s far corners for hours at a time.

The obvious answer was UWB (ultra-wideband). The quotes came back: $2.1 million per site. For 11 facilities, that’s over $23 million. The CFO killed the project in the first budget review.

RFID was cheaper, but it couldn’t do what mattered most: real-time proximity alerting. Knowing a forklift passed a checkpoint 30 seconds ago doesn’t prevent collisions.

The client needed a phased, hybrid approach:

• Start with safety – ROI justifiable through insurance premium reduction
• Layer in asset tracking once infrastructure was in place
• Sub-second alert latency – processed at the forklift, not in the cloud
• Work in cold storage zones (-25°C) and un-airconditioned docks (+55°C)

That’s when they partnered with Yalantis. UWB remains the more accurate technology ( typically 10–30 cm of positioning precision versus 0.5–2 m for standard BLE) and replicating a UWB-grade system one-for-one in BLE would be a significant engineering challenge. But the client didn’t need centimeter-level coordinates. They needed reliable sub-second alerts when a pedestrian crossed into a 4-meter zone around a forklift. Yalantis designed a BLE Direction Finding system engineered around that specific use case: sub-meter angular accuracy from ceiling-mounted AoA locators, edge-processed proximity logic on the forklift, and a hardware footprint that landed at a fraction of UWB’s per-site infrastructure cost.