Trovan

TROVAN EX Cylinder Tracking System: make better, faster decisions

The TROVAN EX Cylinder Tracking System is a state-of-the-art solution for LPG supply chain management. It allows operators to track their cylinders throughout their useful life, recording each transaction from date of manufacture until they are scrapped, in the filling plant and throughout the supply chain. The data collected by the system allows you to demonstrate to your customers that cylinders were properly filled and maintained, and improve decision making and increase the Company’s profitability.

Get total control of your cylinder population:

• Obtain near-real-time intelligence about inventory levels in your filling plants and warehouses, as well as dealer inventories and customer behavior.
• Quickly replenish inventories, and prevent overstocking.
• Prevent loss of cylinders and LPG.
• By increasing the circulation rate of the cylinders in your supply chain, tracking and recovering lost and stolen cylinders, you can reduce the number of new cylinders you need to purchase each year.
• Track drivers and know your dealers' stock levels, and the associated movements of cylinders, to identify points in the supply chain where diversion may be taking place.
• Eliminate paperwork.
• Reduce or eliminate fines for missed or late testing.

A Modular, Configurable System Design

Each LPG marketer has unique requirements, with respect to size of cylinder population, types of cylinders used, level of automation, supply chain architecture, and its immediate business requirements. The Trovan EX Cylinder Tracking System is highly configurable, and is tailored to each customer’s operational requirements.

Trovan EX Transponders and Readers: Purpose-built for performance

Trovan’s solution is based on super-rugged TROVAN transponders and readers, that are purpose-built for the LPG application. TrovanEX™ LF transponders feature an optimal size to performance ratio. Compared to competing products, the TROVAN EX transponders offer the following major advantages:

• Tiny in size.
• Excellent performance on metal. No spacing between cylinders is needed.
• Read on moving conveyors without requiring slowdowns, stops or hydraulics. No spacing between cylinders is needed.
• Works under grease, paint and dirt, and on cylinders in poor condition.
• Unobtrusive to invisible, depending on the cylinder type, and tamper resistant.

When attached, they survive routine bead blasting and all rigors to which LPG cylinders are subjected, throughout the cylinder’s lifetime. The TROVAN RFID technology delivers superior performance on metal assets and in areas with high levels of electro-magnetic interference (EMI), such as filling plant conveyors and carousels.

ATEX-Certified Hardware

All equipment deployed in LPG filling plants must be certified explosion proof. Trovan provides a comprehensive range of tags and readers that are certified for use in the highly explosive LPG filling plant environment, for manual operations as well as high-speed automated processes. (Zone 2, Gas Group IIA & IIB).

Easy to use

The TROVAN EX Tracking System has been developed from the ground up to guarantee ease of use for your drivers and filling plant personnel. Equipment is simple to operate and designed to eliminate operator errors.

Customer Support from Industry Specialists

From solution design to cylinder tagging and hardware roll-out, every LPG operation requires a customized approach.

A Trovan technical team including cylinder tagging, hardware and software specialists help the customer define the requirement, and deploy the solution in filling plants and throughout the supply chain. During the implementation phase, experienced trainers are on-site to assist your staff in the use of each aspect of the system. Comprehensive on-site and remote support packages are available, with 24/7 support options available.

Enterprise-ready solution

Trovan’s high speed, high-volume tag attachment and data collection solutions are purpose-built for use with large numbers of legacy cylinders, allowing operators to efficiently tag and capture the data of their cylinders, in a realistic time frame.

The TROVAN LPG Cylinder Tracking System is enterprise ready, allowing rapid deployment over multiple locations. It is massively scalable across multiple dimensions (users, locations, devices). Furthermore, it resides in the Cloud and is centrally managed for a global enterprise context. Its distributed architecture allows regional and site level monitoring. The System features comprehensive and customizable reporting. The software and database are designed to accommodate scenarios with hundreds of thousands or millions of cylinders and the transactions related to them, as well as smaller operators with more limited requirements.

With low per cylinder cost for the complete solution, including RFID system hardware, tag attachment solution, and tracking software, ROI can be achieved extremely quickly. Supply chain roll-out can be implemented in stages.

Please contact us to discuss your application.

ABOVE: Steel cylinders at unmanned tare entry station. Cylinders are automatically read at the tare entry station to capture tare weight. No keypad data entry required. Antenna is the black panel positioned above the cylinders.

ABOVE: automated tare entry 

ABOVE: reader array at filling plant gate.

ABOVE: Truck ID and pallet IDs automatically captured as truck enters the filling plant.  Know which truck is returning which pallets, and time and date of return. 

ABOVE: Cylinders being delivered at a service station: know which cylinders are being picked up and dropped off, and by which driver.