Geofence tool clearing a 7,000-store fuel-delivery backlog in weeks
A mid-market fuel carrier needed delivery geofences for 7,000 convenience stores. Its dispatch team had been creating roughly 1,000 a month by hand. We built a map-based tool that let the team draw each site boundary and save it directly to the TMS, clearing the remaining backlog in weeks instead of months.
7,000
C-stores geofenced
5+ mo
Backfill eliminated
1K/mo
Previous manual pace
The problem
A mid-market fuel carrier needed a delivery geofence for each of roughly 7,000 convenience stores it serves. Those boundaries do more than put a shape on a map. They establish when a truck has arrived at a site, make delivery-window reporting reliable, and give dispatch and customers a shared record of the stop.
The team had a manual workflow for building them. Each site took several minutes: locate the store, outline its operating area, then save the boundary into the transportation management system (TMS). At roughly 1,000 sites a month, the initial backfill would have consumed about seven months of dispatch capacity.
After the first thousand, the dispatch manager needed a way to finish the work without turning skilled operators into full-time map editors.
What we built
We worked directly with the dispatch manager to build a purpose-made geofence editor around the workflow the team already knew.
An operator opens a convenience store on a map, traces the site boundary with a few points, checks it against the store footprint and access roads, then saves it. The tool writes the completed geofence back to the carrier’s TMS, where the rest of the dispatch operation can use it immediately.
Dispatch draws the delivery boundary once, then saves it directly to the TMS.
The important part was not drawing polygons. It was keeping the operator in one focused workflow and making the TMS the system of record. No exports, no copy-and-paste coordinates, and no separate mapping database to reconcile later.
Results
Before the tool, the team was completing about 1,000 geofences each month. With 6,000 still to complete, that meant approximately six more months of manual backfill.
Once the tool was in the dispatch team’s hands, they completed the remaining stores in a matter of weeks. Conservatively, the carrier eliminated more than five months of backlog work and gave delivery reporting a consistent geofence across all 7,000 sites.
That is the value of operations tooling when it fits the job: a dispatch manager draws a boundary once, the TMS has it immediately, and the team gets back to running deliveries.
Integrated daily Great Plains accounting data and banking-provider pending-invoice data into a regional fuel carrier's existing data lake and data mart. Metabase now combines financial records with operating data for finance reporting, payables, billing-completeness curves, line-haul analysis, and revenue projections.
TCEQ delivery certificates commonly expire at month-end, turning 5,500+ Texas stores into a last-day compliance fire drill. We connected the Texas Open Data Portal to Gravitate so every site's delivery-certificate date updates nightly.
Connected a mid-market fuel carrier's Gravitate dispatch platform to the TMSs its 5,000+ c-store customers run, using Manifold, our TMS integration platform. Customers see live load status, cost, and ETAs in their own systems, place orders that land in Gravitate, and get a DTN-sourced digital BOL for every load.
Consolidated six systems (DTN, Gravitate, Samsara, Bestpass, TMW, Google) into one data platform for the same mid-market fuel carrier. Dashboards track tank outages across 5,000+ sites, hold toll spend to policy and reclaim $200K+ a year, score every delivery window by GPS geofence, and keep driver hours honest.
