Tracking and maintaining capital assets in the process and manufacturing industries can be a monumental and critical task. Typical sites are extremely complex and sometime hazardous, and the failure of capital assets, particularly pressure equipment, in a process units can have any number of highly undesirable effects, including flammable events, toxic releases, major environmental damage, and business interruption losses.

In response, Wonderware, a leading provider of mobile workforce management and decision support solutions, has developed and implements an integrated hardware and software system specifically designed to meet the needs of the process industries that combines wireless hand-held computers, state of the art software, and radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to redefine field data collection and asset management. Wonderware also manufacture a line of RFID readers for integration with ruggedized mobile devices for harsh and hazardous environments, as well as, markets and supports several lines of radio frequency identification tag technologies, hardware, and software products.

Wonderware’s RFID technology can be integrated with other Manufacturing Execution Systems, Enterprise Asset Management, and Enterprise Resource Planning Systems or implemented with IntelaTrac, a workforce management and decision support system for a unique combination of RFID tags, workforce management software, and hand-held computers to provide a cost-effective off-the-shelf solution for performing asset identification and tracking, rotating and fixed equipment inspections, process reliability inspections, and safety critical system inspections.

Increasingly, Wonderware’s RFID approach is being accepted by process manufacturing companies as a way to help ensure EPA Title V and OSHA Process Safety Management (PSM) regulatory compliance can be ensured.

Your remote field workforce needs to quickly and accurately identify specific asset and location information. More importantly, this asset and location information must be consistent with unique identifiers stored in one or more existing applications. You have two predominant options: barcodes or Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) tags.

The problem with barcodes is that they do not last in harsh environments. Further, barcode labels only provide unique ID numbers, which must be associated with remote identifier databases. With RFID tags, asset information (up to 1360 bits of data) is stored locally on the tag.

RFID is the most advanced asset tracking and identification tag technology available today. It provides positive identification and automatic data transfer between a tagged object and a reader, which speeds data collection and improves the quality of data by validating asset and location information. Further, RFID tags have read/write capabilities, so tag data can be updated in the field with mobile computing devices.

Unlike barcodes that use light waves, RFID tags are read by radio waves. RFID tags communicate through non-metallic materials such as paint, plastic, grease, and dirt, and they are impervious to vibration, light, water, and heat up to 100° C. RFID tags and readers have no moving parts; the system rarely needs maintenance and can operate flawlessly for extended periods of time. Most RFID tags have an extremely long life, usually 10 years or more, and they will often outlast the asset to which they are attached.

RFID is the best automatic identification technology alternative when evaluated on a total cost of ownership basis.