RFID Tracks Oil Company Containers and Ships in Newfoundland

A. Harvey is tagging its containers, as well as some vessels and trucks, to increase the visibility of its operations providing equipment, tools and food to offshore oil rigs.

A. Harvey, a Canadian provider of marine and offshore oil and gas support services, is installing an active real-time locating system (RTLS) to locate and track the movements of containers as they are stored and then moved onto and off of vessels destined for oil rigs in the northern Atlantic Ocean. The installation follows a four-month pilot to test the active tags and readers in the harsh environment of the Newfoundland coast, thereby ensuring the tags could sustain the weather at sea and withstand impacts as containers are moved or jarred.

IDBlue is installing and providing integration for the system, provided by Zebra Enterprise Solution (ZES) and consisting of active 2.4 GHz RFID tags, readers and ZES Visibility Server Software (VSS). The company sought an end-to-end container-management system for use at its location at the Newfoundland port in its marine base, where containers are loaded onto and off of vessels, as well as at its container depot, where empty containers are stored and maintained or repaired.

RFIDJ Article: A. Harvey and IDBLUE Business Case

About A. Harvey

A. Harvey provides movement of all items to and from offshore oil rigs, including piping, food, tools and garbage. The firm operates a 13-acre site, including A. Harvey’s marine base and container depot in Newfoundland, where containers destined for the firm’s five oil-platform customers are stored, loaded and unloaded. The containers loaded with cargo travel approximately 220 miles from the shore to the rig, and then back again—a 14-hour journey, round-trip, under cold, wet and windy conditions. Until the new system was installed, A. Harvey manually tracked which containers were shipped and returned, as well as where they were stored at the base, while also manually listing items loaded in each container. The company has a total of 1,400 to 1,500 containers in 30 different form factors.