With increasing frequency, RFID tags and readers are being used to monitor materials and tools at oil and gas facilities, power plants and similar industrial construction projects—often from the point of an item’s manufacture until it is built into the facility. On average, each site tracks between 10,000 and 100,000 critical items, such as fabricated pipe spools, valves and cable. One company has deployed the technology at an oil-sands project, using vehicle-mounted devices with built-in RFID readers and GPS units. In this case, the device is installed in a truck or on a forklift, and personnel simply drive the vehicle around a construction site, warehouse or storage yard. The reader captures the ID numbers of all tags within the vicinity, couples that data with the vehicle’s GPS location and forwards that information via a Wi-Fi or cellular connection, or stores it until the vehicle comes within range of a wireless network connection. Learn how the software can identify the locations of all items, and determine if anything has been moved since its last RFID tag read, as well as whether that location is the one that management would expect.
