Kiosk station
A distraction-free shop-floor screen with large touch targets — moved, partial, cannot move — that polls for new tasks every eight seconds and chimes when one arrives. No sidebar, no menus, nothing to get lost in.
Fluids capability
Cylinder Operations
The cylinder is the asset, the container, the compliance item and the rental unit all at once. Fluids treats it that way — one identity, one history, one ledger, from the day it is received to the day it is scrapped.
Why this is the hard part
A cylinder is not stock. It leaves your premises, comes back, gets refilled with a different gas, gets tested by a statutory authority, accrues rent while a customer holds it, is sometimes owned by that customer, and carries a deposit. Systems designed for boxes on a shelf cannot represent it, which is why most gas companies end up with a separate spreadsheet. Fluids models the cylinder as a first-class asset with its own lifecycle, and every other module reads from it.
Lifecycle
Six stages, one continuous record
01
Arrival and identity
A cylinder enters the system once and is never guessed at again.
- New cylinders received against a purchase order by serial number
- Automatically queued for receiving inspection before they can be used
- Technical spec captured at inspection, not at receipt, so it reflects reality
- Customer-owned cylinders arrive against an expected-intake manifest and are reconciled against the delivery note
02
Ownership and fleet position
The fleet view answers the question your auditor and your customer both ask.
- Segmented by company owned, customer company owned, customer in plant, sold, and out on rental
- Unified per-cylinder history that merges every record source into one timeline
- Trace Passport shows current position, idle hours and a low, medium or high risk flag
- Ownership transfer recorded when a cylinder is sold, with the assignment mapped to the invoice
03
Allocation
Matching the right cylinder to the right order, with no possibility of two operators claiming the same one.
- Four allocation lanes: rental, full sale, quality check and service
- Matched on gas composition, capacity, material of construction and ownership
- Claiming uses a compare-and-swap so a cylinder can only be claimed once, even under concurrent use
- A partial unique index in the database enforces one live dispatch line per cylinder
04
Filling and refill
Whether you fill it yourself or send it out, the chain stays intact.
- Production queue with reserve, fill and complete states
- Donor and receiver gas transfer logged, so consumption is measured rather than estimated
- Refill dispatch queue for cylinders sent to third-party fillers, and inward on return
- Vendor-supply inward for new filled cylinders bought in
- Bulk and cryogenic tanks with tanker receipts, level events and tank-to-cylinder transfer
05
Service and testing
Five service types, each with the parts they consume resolved automatically.
- Gas change, valve change, guard fitting, hydraulic test and full replacement
- A service bill of materials pre-fills the parts to be issued from inventory
- Statutory attributes tracked: tested date, next test due, test pressure, CCOE licence number
- Test-due report so the fleet is scheduled, not discovered overdue at the gate
06
Rental, return and money
The part most systems get wrong, and where the leakage usually is.
- Per-day demurrage accrual after a configurable grace period
- Customer deposit ledger held against cylinders in their possession
- A billing watermark so the same rental day is never billed twice and never skipped
- Rent billed monthly and on return — deliberately not on the dispatch invoice
- Cylinder holdings and rental ageing reports by customer
Safety and compliance
Five places the system says no
Warnings get dismissed. These are enforced.
- Compliance gate
- A cylinder whose hydro test is overdue, or whose CCOE licence details are missing, is blocked from dispatch. The gate is a configuration toggle, so you can run it as advisory during rollout and then switch it to blocking.
- Hazard-class segregation
- Every storage bay declares the gas classes it accepts. A mixture carries every class it contains — argon and hydrogen together count as both inert and flammable — and needs a bay that accepts both. It never blocks on missing master data, so incomplete setup slows nothing down.
- Gas mismatch holds
- A cylinder found holding the wrong gas is parked on hold with an explicit disposition step, rather than quietly re-entering stock.
- Final inspection evidence
- Pre-dispatch inspection captures photographs and annotated defects, and gates the dispatch-readiness board.
- Movement ledger
- Every movement between locations and states is written to a record that is only ever added to, never rewritten, exportable as CSV, so a dispute over where a cylinder was on a given date has an answer.
On the floor
Built for people who are not at a desk
Phone as scanner
The desktop opens a scan session and displays a QR code. A phone scans it and becomes the scanner for that session — no app install, no pairing, no hardware.
Companion scanner app
A React Native application for Android and iOS handsets with camera scanning and haptic feedback, talking to the same backend as everything else. We install it on your devices — it is in preview, not on the app stores.
Branch transfer
Move cylinders and item stock between branches through requested, approved, dispatched and received states, with in-transit visibility to both ends and per-line shortage capture on receipt.
Next
See how quality attaches to every fill
A filled cylinder is only dispatchable if the gas in it passed a test, on a calibrated analyzer, against a versioned method, signed by two people.