Initially, the system was used for a project at the Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) refinery, in Oman, to track 4,000 construction workers as they arrived and departed in approximately 50 buses each day.

The construction firm has also been testing other RFID systems for yard and warehouse management, as well as for fuel station management. Next year, the company says it plans to install the yard and warehouse asset-management and access-control systems during future projects.

CCC constructs and manages oil and gas plants, refineries, petrochemical facilities and pipelines, as well as airports, road networks and skyscrapers. The firm has approximately 35 projects under way throughout the Middle East and Europe, with as many as 130,000 workers at its various worksites and offices. Its worksites can be complex, with a variety of operations taking place, and with employees and contractors undertaking a variety of tasks while travelling onto and off the sites daily, the company says. To track who comes and goes from each site, personnel traditionally must be stationed at the exits and entrances to manually authenticate and record those passing through the gates. With thousands of workers on some sites, this process can be not only time-consuming but vulnerable to errors.

To automate gate access, CCC has been developing and testing RFID-based systems since 2013, seeking a way in which to identify employees arriving at worksites in buses. The company's primary goal is worker safety, says Hazem Rady, CCC's head of IT, EAM solutions, for business technology and innovations. If emergency evacuation were required or if an accident occurred, the company would want to know who was onsite. Additionally, the firm intends to use the collected RFID data to better manage how projects onsite are staffed via analytics, and to enable automatic payroll.

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