Auto-magically Issuing Enterprise Consumables

I work for a construction company. My company spends a lot of money issuing out PPE (Personal Protective Equipment) to subcontractors at great administrative and material cost. We still must give out PPE to make sure that workers are adequately protected from potential injury.

The real problem with this is that once we start providing this equipment, people take for granted the value of the equipment and the cost can escalate quite quickly. On the other hand, the subcontractor companies should be responsible for issuing equipment to their labour force. On a large construction site recording and administering PPE for back-charging quickly becomes a huge task when done manually.

To cut down administration and tracking costs for PPE, I propose a RFID vending machine using already available ID cards to dispense PPE and record usage for simplified accounting. I developed this idea in my own time as a personal project/challenge to pitch to the company I work for.

The plan is as follows. Setup a vending machine that can dispense all of the most common PPE. The vending machine is to use Android things, Arduino and RFID to record PPE issued. Workers will each be given a monthly allowance for PPE.

This could easily be extended to other workplaces where there is a need to track inventory of consumables.