The fragile complexity of the holiday season
To enjoy the holiday season, it’s essential that everything works properly – from mobile apps to airports to basic utilities – all these systems must work well (and work together) to ensure happy holidays. This time of year, tens of millions of people hit the roads and skies, utility consumption peaks, and the global logistics network runs at maximum capacity.
Beneath the surface, the systems sustaining our way of life are under intense pressure. For executives responsible for large-scale infrastructure, this is not just a time of cheer; it’s a critical stress test for their entire asset management strategy.
What if parts of the system can’t withstand the holiday stress test?
All it takes is one missing piece of the puzzle.
For example, delays caused by poor asset management have an outsized impact. This occurs across critical sectors:
Construction & Development: Major projects can stall when a specific type of asset, such as a cable or pipe spool cannot be physically located in the vast, often muddy, laydown yard. That single search delay can result in missed deadlines and significant cost overruns.
Utilities: A service outage often requires locating a critical valve or splice point buried beneath the roadway. If the GIS map is off by even a foot or two, field crews spend precious hours (and risk a utility strike) digging based on inaccurate records, delaying repair and escalating liability.
Logistics & Inventory: Tracking high-value components (e.g., specialized equipment, telecommunications hardware) through temporary storage or transfer points relies on outdated line-of-sight barcoding. This creates "accountability gaps" that lead to lost inventory and costly disputes.
The financial impact of this uncertainty is what keeps CFOs up at night. The "missing piece of the puzzle" isn't just an operational headache; it's a direct hit to ROI, compliance audit trails, and risk mitigation.
InfraMarker: Locking Asset Data to Physical Reality
Identifying buried infrastructure using InfraMarker RFID
Companies like Berntsen International are solving this challenge by permanently connecting physical assets to their verifiable, location-linked digital twin via InfraMarker RFID technology.
This is how modern, data-driven organizations move beyond traditional guesswork:
Permanent, Durable Identity: InfraMarker uses rugged RFID tags embedded in the asset itself or placed directly over buried infrastructure. Unlike temporary markers or easily corrupted barcodes, durable RFID tags don’t require line-of-sight and can be read through concrete, asphalt and other materials. Additionally, passive RFID tags don’t require batteries, so they can last for decades.
GIS-Linked Certainty: More than 75% of Fortune 500 businesses use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to access location-based information about assets for management and planning purposes. RFID is an incredibly versatile technology and is especially powerful when integrated into GIS. This combination can literally verify the identity and location of any scanned asset instantly. For example, when a field worker scans a tag, its unique ID instantly links to its central record in GIS (such as Esri’s ArcGIS). This small act delivers reality instead of guesswork. It means a shift from "I know where the asset should be on the GIS map" to "I am physically located at the exact, verified asset."
This GIS-linkage is important for anything from managing assets to conducting wildlife assessments, as this case study shows.Real-Time Inventory Accountability: For high-value construction inventory in laydown yards, RFID readers can perform bulk reads, instantly reconciling hundreds of items in minutes, verifying their presence, and linking them to their GPS location in the yard. No more "inventory shrinkage."
Auditable Lifecycle Management: Every time an asset is read, verified, or serviced, a time-stamped, location-verified transaction is recorded. This creates a bulletproof audit trail critical for regulatory compliance and lifecycle investment planning. Automatically generating auditable data can make all the difference as this case study reveals.
Protect Your Budget, Ensure the Holiday Flow
For executives, the goal is clear: to ensure the systems that allow families to travel, electricity to flow, and commerce to thrive are resilient.
The combination of RFID asset verification and GIS location intelligence delivers certainty. Executives can avoid costly delays, reduce liability from utility strikes, and ensure that every dollar spent on predictive maintenance is based on verifiable data.
Give your team the gift of absolute asset visibility this holiday season. See the InfraMarker Connect Starter Kit and find out how RFID and GIS can deliver verifiable asset information – for any asset, from fossils to infrastructure assets.
Want to learn how InfraMarker connects your assets to your existing GIS? Request a short, personalized demo today.