Two Canadian companies, Guard RFID Solutions Inc. of Vancouver, British Columbia and Focus FS of St. John’s, Newfoundland have partnered to deliver a unique solution for one of Newfoundland’s offshore oil and gas projects. This innovative system enables accurate tracking and location of tagged personnel for real-time visibility in the event of an emergency incident. The system also supports the tracking and management of materials – such as equipment and tools – which reduces the time required to locate them, assists with maintenance schedules, and prevents loss. This Personnel Safety solution, provided by Focus FS, is the first solution of its kind to be implemented in the Newfoundland offshore oil & gas industry. As a result of its successful deployment, GuardRFID and Focus FS have agreed to enter into a strategic distribution agreement that will see Focus FS deploying GuardRFID solutions in the east coast offshore oil and gas market.
GuardRFID’s system offers long range as well as proximity detection, allowing for real-time location services and instantaneous portal detection. Its field proven Yard and Industrial infrastructure devices are designed to be able to withstand the harshest of environments, and are supported by a variety of tag types and configurations for placement on people and objects. The company’s Active Label, which is the lowest profile active tag available in the industry, will be placed on hard hats of employees working on the project site. This ensures that personnel are always equipped with a tag that is unobtrusive and does not hinder their ability to do work safely. GuardRFID’s Staff tags offer enhanced functionality for applications where Lone Worker Safety is required. These tags can be worn like a standard ID-badge, and have configurable buttons that can be used to support a duress call, bidirectional communications, on-tag annunciation, and “Man Down” detection all in a thin ID-badge form factor.
“GuardRFID’s active RFID platform has been successfully utilized in several different vertical markets to date, and we are excited about the opportunity to serve a new market segment”, said Zahir Abji, GuardRFID’s President and CEO. “Besides assisting companies in this new market to enhance personnel safety, our system capabilities can provide significant return on investment to them by enabling them to utilize the same infrastructure for other applications, such as managing and securing assets for example.”
“We investigated several possible technologies and systems for our customer, and found GuardRFID’s AllGuard system to be the most suitable due to its reliable detection capability, choice of tag types available, flexibility, and rich feature set. It was also a natural fit as there wasn’t any new development required and was certified to integrate with the existing systems used by our customer” said Jeff Brown, President of Focus FS. “Our partnership with GuardRFID allows us to provide customers in the industrial sector with field-ready solutions, thereby avoiding significant custom development schedules and allowing our clients to realize benefits earlier in the lifecycle of their industrial project.”
