New Castle, DE – XCS Corp. has announced the formation of Sky-Trax Inc., a new company that will commercialize patent-pending technology developed by XCS for identifying the location of movable objects inside buildings.

Sky-Trax will develop, manufacture, and distribute products and systems based on the new Sky-Marx Position Reference System and Sky-Trax Local Positioning System technologies. The company is initially targeting warehouse and factory operations, where the precise location of items is often not recorded or known. Sky-Marx and Sky-Trax track materials, especially in open storage areas.

Richard Ungerbuehler, XCS general manager, said that the Sky-Trax concept was born when a customer asked the company to solve one of the most stubborn problems in logistics -- how to precisely identify pallet locations in large bulk-storage warehouses. Drawing upon data collection and system development experience, Ungerbuehler and the XCS staff came up with a solution to determine the exact location of items as they are moved and stored.

According to David Emanuel, vice president of technology, Sky-Trax products are based on optical components instead of radio wave technology. As a result, Sky-Trax solutions can be deployed in most buildings, as well as used in outdoor areas like storage yards. He likened using the Sky-Trax Local Positioning System on fork lift trucks to having Global Positioning Systems on each truck. The company claimed the system is immune to radio interference and not affected by building steel or concrete, allowing system users to track materials and resources with much better accuracy than previously.

The company said it plans to introduce a family of products designed for warehousing, logistics, inventory management, and materials tracking applications. According to, Larry Mahan, marketing general manager, Sky-Trax will introduce a system by the end of 2005 that can be used to track and store the movement and location of all materials in a warehouse with no scanning actions required by materials handlers. He added the systems will be compatible with and complimentary to existing bar code and RFID systems, and will integrate with business software.

Initially, Sky-Trax Inc. plans to work with beta customers to validate the Sky-Trax system. Sky-Trax Inc. has general offices, a demonstration warehouse facility, and production space at the Airport Industrial Center in New Castle, Delaware.

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