Real-time TMS integration that gave 5,000+ c-stores live visibility into every fuel load

The client's name has been anonymized at the customer's request. The market, technologies, and solution are presented as delivered.

The problem

A mid-market fuel carrier delivers gasoline and diesel to more than 5,000 convenience stores. Every one of those c-stores runs on fuel arriving when expected: tanks dip toward reserve daily, prices move daily, and a late load is lost revenue at the pump.

The carrier had the data. Gravitate, its supply and dispatch platform, knew every order, every load, every cost, every ETA. But its customers don’t work in Gravitate. They run their own systems: Telapoint, TMW, Planet 9, Titan, Trimble, and others. None of them could see the carrier’s data. When a fuel buyer wanted to know where a load was, what it cost, or when it would hit the tank, they called dispatch.

Ordering ran the same way in reverse. Customers placed orders by phone or email, and the carrier’s team re-keyed them into Gravitate. Slow, error-prone, and invisible to everyone until the truck showed up.

What we built

We deployed Manifold, our TMS integration platform built for fuel carriers, as the layer between Gravitate and every system the carrier’s customers run.

Orders now flow both ways. A c-store chain places an order in its own TMS and it lands in Gravitate automatically: no phone call, no re-keying. From the moment the order exists, status flows back the other way. Dispatch, load assignment, in-transit updates, cost, and delivery confirmation sync into the customer’s system at 1.8 seconds median latency.

Each customer endpoint speaks a different protocol. Some are modern APIs, some are EDI, some are scheduled file drops. Manifold takes one canonical order event and renders it for whatever each system expects, with field-level mapping and per-customer transforms instead of per-customer code.

Two fuel-specific problems got first-class treatment:

• Compliance. Texas deliveries require valid TCEQ numbers. Manifold syncs them across systems automatically, so every order carries current registration data and compliance never holds up a load.
• BOLs. Bills of lading pull straight from DTN, the authoritative source at the rack. Every load closes with a digital BOL attached to its order record: no chasing paper, no disputes over what was lifted.

Every sync run is observable, audited, and retryable from Manifold’s operator console, so the carrier’s team can see exactly what moved where, and when.

Results

The carrier’s 5,000+ c-store customers see live load status, cost, and delivery ETAs from the systems they already use. The “where’s my load” calls that used to fill dispatch’s day are gone from the workflow. Orders land in Gravitate without re-keying, TCEQ data stays current everywhere, and every delivery closes with an authoritative digital BOL from DTN.

The integration runs at 99.98% sync uptime, and the carrier onboards new customer systems through configuration, not code.

In fuel hauling, every carrier delivers the load. The one that shows its customers where the load is, what it costs, and when it lands keeps the contract.