Use of RFID Technology for Automatic Job Costing

Related Work, Motivation, And Objectives

Accurate information is crucial in the context of managing large projects. It is essential that businesses that perform work on large, labor-intensive projects have accurate job costing information, particularly with the labor part of the job. The motivation for this project came from our interaction with a business that faced challenges with respect to the job costing of projects. This business had many large projects going at the same time, and their employees worked intermittently on all of the projects. At the end of the week, the project foreman estimated the amount of time that each employee worked on each project for job costing purposes. His estimates were not very accurate, so neither was the job costing information.

Our research objective was to develop an innovative use of RFID technology to address the challenge of collecting accurate job costing information. Our idea was to equip workers with RFID tags and collect information automatically at reading stations located at the individual project locations. After collecting the data, an information system would have to be developed to make use of the data for the purposes of job costing.