Case Study: Acuity Brands achieves $1M savings and a 1-year payback with Atrius real-time location services

Optimizing Acuity Brands Warehouse Operations Using Real-Time Location Services: Fork Trucks

Acuity Brands’ Midwest Distribution Center (MWDC) in Des Plaines, IL needed a facility relight for energy savings and saw an opportunity to optimize space and justify the investment by adding indoor positioning. The challenge was to upgrade lighting across the 480,000 sq ft facility while finding a cost-effective way to deploy real-time location services (RTLS) to improve operations without excessive additional hardware or wiring.

Working with Atrius, MWDC installed 864 IBG high-bay LED luminaires with Light Air controls and used the lighting network as the RTLS platform, tagging forklifts and palletized loads with battery-operated trackers. The system revealed only 75% simultaneous forklift utilization, enabling the team to eliminate leased trucks, adjust maintenance, and accelerate ROI—cutting the relight payback from 3.5 years to one year, saving about $1M in electrical and fleet costs on a $425K project.

Acuity Brands