nexTrack: Bringing Real-Time Visibility to Industrial Gas and Equipment Assets

Industrial gas operations involve a lot of moving pieces. Cylinders travel between facilities, branches, and customer sites. Trucks run routes across multiple stops. Orders get placed, modified, and delivered while accounting records need to stay current through all of it. For years, keeping tabs on all of that relied heavily on manual processes, phone calls, and paperwork that got reconciled after the fact.

nexTrack changes the fundamental dynamic by making the current state of assets and deliveries visible to everyone who needs to see it, in real time.

What nexTrack Connects

nexTrack isn’t a single tool. It’s three technologies running together: cylinder barcoding through Advanced Cylinder Management, GPS routing through Roadnet, and paperless field documentation through TIMS Electronic Delivery. Each one generates live data. Together they give branches, plants, drivers, and customer support teams a shared operational picture rather than separate, disconnected records.

That shared view is where most of the practical value lives. When everyone in the operation is looking at the same current information, the coordination problems that come from working off different versions of reality start to disappear.

From the Driver’s Perspective

The on-the-ground experience of nexTrack is worth understanding because it’s where data accuracy originates. Drivers handle deliveries through handheld devices that replace paper tickets entirely. Lot numbers get scanned rather than handwritten. A single sign-in applies a signature across every order for that stop. When a delivery is complete, proof of delivery goes to the customer electronically before the driver pulls away.

Steve Hopkins, a nexAir driver, described it plainly: lot numbers are easier to manage through scanning, and being able to email a receipt directly from the customer site without physical contact simplified the end of every stop. Currently 75 percent of nexAir’s orders move through TIMS. The accuracy of everything downstream, billing, inventory balances, return credits, depends on the quality of data captured at that moment of delivery, and TIMS makes that data reliable.

What the Customer Sees

On the receiving end, nexTrack surfaces delivery information that used to require a phone call to get. Roadnet connects to our fleet of over 200 drivers and pushes notifications with delivery windows, status updates, and confirmation when a order arrives. If something changes, the customer hears about it through whatever channel they’ve set up, email, SMS, or otherwise, without having to track anyone down.

For operations where a late delivery affects a production schedule, that advance notice is the difference between making an adjustment and getting caught flat-footed.

What Management Gets

At the operational level, nexTrack gives branches and plants visibility across their full cylinder inventory: where assets are, how long they’ve been at a given location, what’s been returned and credited, and what usage patterns look like over time. That information supports better supply planning, faster response to customer questions, and earlier identification of assets sitting idle past their expected return window.

It also gives our customer support team a clear picture of what any account has on hand and what’s in transit, which makes support conversations more useful and less dependent on estimates.

Backed by our expert KnowHow™, we help our clients Forge Forward with ease. If that kind of operational visibility sounds useful, reach out to your local nexAir team and let’s talk through what it looks like for your setup.