Industry Brief: Motorola's RFID Solutions In The Oil And Gas Industry

In the trillion-dollar oil and gas industry, success hinges on timely and error-free delivery of product through a complex, high value supply chain. In this extraordinarily capital intensive business, a failure of even the shortest duration anywhere along the supply chain can instantly ripple into a multi-million dollar loss.

In this high-stakes environment, proper infrastructure maintenance as well as inventory and asset management are not just regulatory issues, they're mission critical for business health — and employee safety. Inspections, routine maintenance, and repairs must be performed on time on oil rigs, pipelines and downstream facilities to not only prevent the disastrous ramifications of a failure — but also to maximize the efficiency and lifespan of key infrastructure investments, where a single component failure can result in million dollar losses.

However, tracking assets, workers, asset maintenance histories and even the production and distribution of product are a challenge in far flung operations. The paper-based processes that are typically utilized are labor-intensive, costly, present significant opportunity for error and often result in the very slow movement of information to key decision makers. Lack of information visibility can threaten the health of the business, rapidly translating into inventory shortages that can result in unplanned downtime in the field, process inefficiencies that can result in reduced staff utilization and non-compliance with recordkeeping requirements that can translate into heavy fines or even the injury of employees.