Saving a billion...maybe

Article: http://www.engadget.com/2005/06/14/rfid-prevents-power-tool-theft/

Bosch Power Tools has decided to take a step towards preventing power tools from being stolen from constructions sites: they're placing RFID chips in their tools. This is a smart move, seeing as how last year alone the construction industry lost between $300 million and $1 billion to equipment theft.

Construction managers will use a device to scan all the tools at their site, and the tools' tracking information will be transmitted to a database. This is supposed to keep track of a site's equipment and prevent theft. However, I fail to see how this accomplishes the latter. I suppose at the end of each work day, scanning the entire site with a RFID reader would verify that all the equipment is there -- if something is missing, the database will show it because its RFID tag wasn't detected during scanning. So while this system may tell the manager that something was stolen, how does it actually prevent it?

I only see three ways to make this plan work. The first entails a RFID-reading entrance/exit to the construction site, so that if an employee walks off with a tool, an alarm will go off. The second is to have a RFID-reading security camera system that will detect a tool leaving the site and will take a photo of the perpetrator. The third way is to just have the manager scan everyone with a RFID reader as they leave to make sure they don't have any company property on them.

Simply having a database of company assets will not prevent theft -- there needs to be some sort of detection system.