Intralogistics
FROM PAPER TO SENSOR
ORGATEX turns the paper kanban card into a digital product.
Project / Client
For more than 50 years, ORGATEX from Langenfeld has been equipping warehouses and production facilities. Its range extends from floor marking and shelf and container labelling to insert systems for lean and kanban.
In 2021, ORGATEX founded its digital intralogistics division. The tasks remained the same – only now a sensor was to report what a kanban card used to show. ORGATEX brought IOX on board for the implementation.
The Situation
At the end customer, material control ran on paper. Kanban cards were inserted, pulled and carried. Anyone who needed material went to the warehouse and reported it by hand.
Shortages only became apparent when the line came to a standstill. Stock levels were not recorded in any system, and the ERP knew nothing about them.
ORGATEX had known this problem up close for decades. What it lacked in-house was the ability to develop and operate a connected product for it.
The Key Question
How does a manufacturer build a digital product that it can later continue to develop on its own?
The device was not the hardest part. The time afterwards was harder. Without its own team, ORGATEX would have had to buy in every update again.
What We Built
PRODUCT: A quickly and roughly built prototype of an IoT button was the first step. It gave rise to the product family eOX-Button, eOX-Label with e-paper display, kanban and location sensor, and OX-Spot.
SYSTEM: The devices communicate via NB-IoT and LTE-M, chosen for large halls with lots of metal, plus Thread as a mesh and Bluetooth. They connect to the ORGATEX cloud. Over-the-air updates keep the devices in the field reachable, and an API brings the data into the end customer’s ERP.
TEAM: IOX did not only develop – it built up the product team at ORGATEX in parallel. We introduced agile development and added back-end architects to the team. Work was done in sprints, with continuous handover along the way. IOX calls this Product-Team-as-a-Service.
The Result
An entire product family went live: the eOX-Button and the eOX-Label are available on the market, in operation and updatable over the air.
Material control at the end customer works better. Up to 90 pages of paper are saved per order. Orders are placed without a trip to the warehouse, and shortages are noticed before the line stops.
This made something possible that goes beyond the product. Today, ORGATEX has its own digital business unit. In November 2024, ORGATEX and IOX appeared together on the podcast “IoT Use Case”. In January 2026, ORGATEX appeared there on its own and explained its vision of the smart home of intralogistics.
up to 90
fewer pages of paper per order at the end customer