Construction engineering firm Bechtel deployed an award-winning RFID solution for a complex project involving construction of three liquified natural gas (LNG) plants on Curtis Island in Queensland, Australia.
Bechtel deployed the Jovix system from Atlas RFID Solutions to assist in tracking delivery of materials from mainland storage locations to the construction sites. The island location of the vast sites, requiring delivery by water, enabled automation of work processes typically performed manually.
Thirteen RFID gate readers -- five installed at the mainland port facilities and one at each of the Curtis Island base ports -- have so far detected more than 6.3 million tags reads for the project. And Bechtel has tracked 1.2 million tag movements.
“Without having an RFID solution, every one of those 1.2 million tag movements would have had to be manually recorded in the project databases,” says Edward Koch, automation specialist and software product manager for Bechtel.
Koch says that without RFID, it could take up to 45 days to process an entire delivery of steel for part of the project. RFID reduced that time to 22 days. “That’s a real savings that you can obviously look at and understand in terms of labor and having the materials available at the workplace,” says Koch.
Bechtel received a CETI Award for its use of RFID technology on the LNG projects. Fiatech's CETI Awards honor individuals and companies that have conducted new and emerging technology implementations.
RFID Journal has also recognized Bechtel with its Best RFID Implementation Award for the project.
