Dive Brief:

• Bechtel's experience with a project to build liquefied natural gas plants on three Australian islands has demonstrated time and cost savings by using high-tech tracking of construction materials.
• The company decided to use radio-frequency identification tags (RFID) on steel being shipped from a mainland storage site to the three construction sites.
• Bechtel has tracked 1.2 million movements with the tags, and that reportedly reduced the time to ship and track the material from 45 days to 22.

Dive Insight:

RFID tags have become cheaper in the years since they were invented, which makes them an option for large projects with budgets that make parts tracking critical. An RFID tag uses energy from an interrogation signal to power its circuitry and respond with its unique identifier.