By Keith Bowen
If you haven’t taken a look at microdot technology as a likely addition to your defensive lineup against thievery of assets on your construction sites, now might be the time. It’s a versatile tool that’s proven as helpful for protecting rhinos from poachers as it has keeping cars out of chop shops. So why not your equipment, tools and materials?
Construction site security is a constant concern, when anywhere from $300 million to $1 billion in equipment is stolen each year. (And that doesn’t even include the tools and building materials that are easy targets.)
Contractors have two lines of defense against thievery: Securing the work site itself and securing the assets within it. Part and parcel of good management, especially since neither defensive line is fail-safe, is to keep an inventory of assets, and identifying information: serial numbers, VINs, and identification plates or markings.
Those identifying numbers will be included in reporting the theft of assets to local law enforcement as well as your claim to your insurance company for items of value. Those will be proof, if the property is recovered, that it’s the same that was reported as stolen.
Of course, the determined thief will find ways around those identifiers – it’s pretty easy to grind off a marker and not impossible to locate and disable a GPS tracking device. If you’ve used the microdot technology on your equipment, though, you’ve just upped the ante.
The roots of microdots date back to 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, when a Parisian photographer used a photographic shrinking technique so that carrier pigeons could carry a higher volume of messages to and from the besieged Paris. The concept was modernized and used by the Germans for espionage purposes during World Wars I and II, and further modernized in the U.S. in the 1990s, and then becoming commercialized globally.
Today, microdot identification entails etching or coding unique numbers on these tiny identification tags. The microdots are about .3mm in size, and each contains nine lines of data, including the unique identifier. They can be put on assets of any size through a brush or spray-on application system. They’re advantageous because they are difficult to see with the naked eye (requiring a UV light to read) and almost impossible to remove. The microdot identifiers are listed in a comprehensive asset register through which a stolen item can be linked to its rightful owner.
Microdots are part of a system that can cut down on construction firms’ risk and, ultimately, impact their insurance premiums. That makes the technology something to worth investigating further.
HUB International’s consultants are available to work with you in trends and developments that may impact your risk posture today and in the future.