Bechtel is a world-wide engineering and construction organization serving customers in a variety of industries from power, petroleum and chemical plants, to aviation services and the hotel industry. The equipment leasing arm of the company, Bechtel Equipment Operations Inc. (BEO), supplies all the tools and equipment needed to keep their global construction projects operating efficiently.

Reliant Energy Wholesale Group, a division of Reliant Energy, is a leading provider of electricity, natural gas and energy services in the U.S.A. With a portfolio of electric power and co-generation plants in the Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, Texas and the West, Reliant has 20,000 megawatt of power generation capacity in operation, under construction or under contract.

Like any power generating facility, plants in the Reliant system experience routine outages for scheduled maintenance and forced outages due to mechanical failure that require immediate response. A single Reliant maintenance shop in Brookville, PA issues all the tools required for maintenance and repairs for some 25 plants from New York to Oregon and south to Florida. Some tools are drawn from satellite tool cribs that are moved where and when needed.

TransAlta, Canada's largest investor-owned electric utility, boasts more than $5 billion in assets and $1.6 billion in revenues, it recently discovered a problem at one of its plants that was costing the company both time and money. In its Edmonton plant tool crib, tools were flowing out to work sites but were not always being returned, and the company had no way to accurately track where the tools were or who had them last. Crib operators were armed with nothing more than a sign-out sheet and when tools didn't come back, there was no way to assign responsibility to anyone for the loss.

Unfortunately, tool theft, unreliable tool tracking, and a lack of tool accountability are common problems at plants everywhere. Too often, these plants operate with archaic "pen and paper" procedures that not only slow issue/return times, but also lack the tracking information required to help curb tool-related losses within an organization. TransAlta decided it was time to fix this problem in its Edmonton plant. A main ingredient...