The National Equipment Register estimates that equipment and tool theft costs the construction industry over $1 billion annually in the United States alone. In Europe, the figures are comparable. And unlike other forms of theft, tool theft on job sites has a compounding effect: you lose the tool, you lose the time finding a replacement, and you lose the day of work that was planned around using it.
The standard responses are locks, cameras, and insurance. None of them solve the core problem. Locks can be cut. Cameras record what happened after the fact. Insurance requires proof of ownership that few companies bother to maintain for individual tools.
The tools that get stolen most are also the ones that are hardest to identify once they leave the site: angle grinders, drills, nail guns, laser levels. Most of them have serial numbers. Almost nobody records those serial numbers.
A tool that has been registered with a photo, a serial number, and a QR tag can be identified when it turns up at a pawnshop or on a second-hand marketplace. Law enforcement can act on that. Without the record, they cannot, even if the stolen item is sitting in front of them.
For companies managing multiple sites and teams, the tracking benefit goes beyond theft prevention. Knowing which tools are where, who checked them out, and what condition they are in reduces the constant friction of missing equipment that was not stolen but simply left at the wrong site.
The cost of tagging and registering a professional power tool is trivial compared to the cost of replacing it. The habit is the only real barrier, and that barrier is lower than it used to be.