To begin with Tracworx was a patient flow management company which developed hardware and software for tracking patients throughout the perioperative process, allowing hospitals to benchmark their patient flows, improve them and ultimately deliver more surgeries to patients in need. The specialty of this system was its ability to install without adding additional infrastructure. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, this unique selling point became its biggest blocker. The hospital market closed up overnight and Tracworx was left in a position to reapply its technology to survive.
As part of our product strategy, Tracworx was going to implement a way to record patient-doctor contact time, however when contact tracing became one of the pillars of the public-health emergency response strategy Tracworx knew that it had to apply its technology there. A niche was identified with on-premise organisations (organisations which cannot function through a Work From Home setup) that the publicly available contact tracing app couldn’t fill. This gap was around the lack of relevant data available to the companies, they needed to know which of their team was in contact with other people on-site. This was especially useful in areas where mobile phones couldn’t be carried.
The system (named Blueworx) works by recording the time spent between using Tracworx devices which are able to record each other's locations. If an interaction has been recorded for more than 15 minutes (by World Health Organisation standards) this is noted as a contact. In the event that a person notifies their organisation that they have symptoms or a positive COVID test, a list is generated by the system and these close contacts can be isolated appropriately. This system was implemented across 7 countries (Ireland, Northern Ireland, England, Malta, Tenerife and Fuerteventura), allowing over 10,000 people to return to work safely. Tracworx gained customers such as AppleTV, TG4, Reagecon and many more across the movie industry, pharmaceutical companies and many more.
Tracworx understood that this was a public health emergency and that it wouldn’t be a sustainable market to chase long term. During the sales and marketing push for Blueworx, Tracworx was approached by a company using returnable packaging which had a big issue around asset tracking, which was on Tracworx's technology roadmap, losing up to 10% of a €90-100 million fleet every year, causing huge financial, environmental and operational challenges. With the expansion from patient-tracking to Blueworx, Tracworx had already made a fundamental change, Tracworx became an API first company. Tracworx understood that it's true value wasn’t in patient-tracking but in data. This shift meant that Tracworx had to build the capability to ingest tracking information from any source, by becoming hardware agnostic and only selecting hardware based on how effective it is for each situation (moving away from the one size fits all approach). This opened up opportunities both in Europe and globally for asset tracking.
Now Tracworx works with companies that already use returnable packaging such as pallets, kegs and, in the future, reusable bottles/containers. These companies lose hundreds of thousands of these assets every year, causing huge financial, environmental and operational challenges. We help companies track their packaging assets and reduce their associated costs.
By doing this, companies also meet ESG goals and sustainability standards. Effective tracking is a crucial part of the growing circular economy. Deloitte's 2021 Global Chief Procurement Officer Survey highlighted challenges these companies face are around poor quality data and systems integrations to enable better analytics.
Tracworx solves the first challenge by gathering quality real-time asset tracking data for the Procurement and Production/Operations teams. The platform is also API first so Tracworx is better equipped to integrate with existing legacy systems. Tracworx provides absolute transparency and clarity into the Chain of Custody for returnable packaging.
