Private logistics companies in China fuel their fleets from their own SKID tanks — compact, containerised diesel stations fed at discounted rates by the majors. The regulatory bargain is strict: permits restrict the fuel to logistics use only, and every transaction must be monitored. For an operator with tanks spread across the country, compliance isn’t paperwork — it’s an engineering problem.
From 2016, DAE (Digital Assistant for Energy) ran that engineering problem for logistics operators across China with three modules: Forecourt Controller, Fleet, and Central Management. The fuelling journey was the control system:
- 1A truck arrives; ANPR cameras read the number plate
- 2The central system checks the vehicle against its authorisation — who may fuel, what they may fuel, when, and where
- 3Only on approval does the attendant fuel the vehicle
- 4The transaction is recorded with its CCTV footage — a complete, auditable trail with no paper in the loop
Because a SKID site is small and standardised, deployment was industrialised: the DAE controller connected to local dispenser and gauge hardware, linked to the cloud over 4G — a new site was live in 2–3 days. At its peak the platform controlled more than 200 fuelling points.
What it proved
A later change in national policy ended the SKID fuelling model in China, and the estate was wound down. What the deployment proved travels anywhere fleets fuel: per-vehicle and per-driver authorisation, ANPR at the pump, rule-based control of when, where, and what any vehicle can draw, and an audit trail a regulator can accept — at a scale of hundreds of sites, commissioned in days each. This is the capability the Fleet module runs today.
Fleet fuelling control isn't a card program bolted onto a POS. It's the forecourt, the rules engine, and the evidence trail working as one system — and it has run at national scale.