This article delves into the innovative application of industrial mobile computing and automatic identification technology in the high-end energy engineering sector. Through the practical case of Tianjin Binhai New Area Offshore Oil Engineering Co., Ltd., a subsidiary of a leading Chinese marine oil engineering company, it demonstrates how the integrated solution of "Industrial Tablet Computer + RFID" tackles material identification and management challenges in offshore oil pipeline welding operations, providing a reliable solution for the digital transformation and refined control of engineering construction.

User Background

Tianjin Binhai New Area Offshore Oil Engineering Co., Ltd. is a listed company and a subsidiary of China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC). Headquartered in Tianjin Binhai New Area, the company is the only large-scale engineering general contractor in China that integrates the engineering design, onshore manufacturing, offshore installation, commissioning, and maintenance of liquefied natural gas and refining projects with offshore oil and gas development. Furthermore, it is one of the largest and most influential EPCI (Engineering, Procurement, Construction, and Installation) general contractors in the Asia-Pacific region, boasting a vast customer base and a global business scope.

Challenges

When implementing high-standard engineering operations such as offshore oil pipeline welding, the company faces severe challenges in material and process management. Paper labels attached to materials like pipe fittings required for welding are prone to wear, tear, or detachment during transportation, storage, and in harsh engineering environments, leading to loss of material information and posing risks to production traceability and quality control. Concurrently, construction operations heavily rely on paper drawings and process cards to confirm operational steps and requirements. This method is inconvenient for retrieval, inefficient, and makes real-time process monitoring and data synchronization difficult, becoming a major obstacle to advancing engineering digitalization and improving management efficiency.

The traditional paper-centric material and process management approach exposes numerous bottlenecks in complex offshore oil engineering projects:

• Unreliable information carrier: Paper labels are easily damaged, causing loss of material identity information, affecting traceability accuracy, and creating hidden dangers for quality and safety.
• Inefficient process dependency: Construction heavily relies on paper drawings and process cards. On-site consultation, step confirmation, signature archiving, and other processes are cumbersome, lowering overall operational efficiency.
• High management costs: Reliance on paper documents leads to high costs for printing, archiving, and retrieval. Moreover, manual data entry is prone to errors, increasing correction and management costs.

By deploying the integrated solution of "Industrial Tablet Computer + RFID," the offshore oil engineering company achieved significant operational and management value enhancement in its pipeline welding operations:

• Achieved process digitalization and management standardization: Replaced paper documents with electronic process cards, achieving full-process digitization of construction step confirmation and quality signatures, effectively standardizing on-site operational procedures.
• Improved operational efficiency and reliability: RFID technology ensured the durability and reliability of material identification, while industrial tablet computers enabled efficient on-site electronic operations. The combination of the two significantly enhanced the operational efficiency and reliability of the entire chain, from material tracking to welding construction.

The company adopted an integrated digital solution centered on "Industrial Tablet Computers" and "RFID Technology":

• UHF RFID tag management: Applied Ultra-High-Frequency (UHF) RFID tags to various pipelines and pipe fittings. These tags are durable, have a long lifespan, and can withstand the challenges of the offshore engineering environment, fundamentally solving the problem of paper tags being easily damaged, and achieving reliable, automatic identification of material identity.
• Deep integration with industrial tablet computers: On-site engineers were equipped with high-performance industrial tablet computers, connected via Type-C ports to UHF RFID reader/writer modules. This enabled long-distance, batch rapid identification and information retrieval of materials with RFID tags on-site, greatly improving the efficiency of material verification and information entry.
• Full-process digitalization and real-time synchronization: This solution replaced all paper documents with mobile applications integrating electronic drawings and process cards. On-site personnel could complete operations such as step confirmation, data recording, and electronic signatures on the tablet computers. All data was transmitted back in real-time to the project's central management system via 5G networks, achieving a full-process digital closed-loop and real-time information transparency from on-site operations to backend management.