75% reduction in gas return processing time (from 2 hours to 30 minutes daily)
$30,000 in assets recovered within the first year
30,000+ cylinders under active digital tracking
Billing accuracy improved across delivery, return, and rental cycles
ERP replaced to enable direct TrackAbout integration
Before TrackAbout, a Datacor product, Huber Supply Company managed roughly 30,000 cylinders across multiple branches — doing it blind.
"We were running two different systems, and they weren't talking to one another," said Nicole Smith, VP of Administration. "At the end of the day, we'd have to run through all the invoices to match every single order. It took a lot of time and effort."
Cylinder returns were manually keyed into spreadsheets. Delivery tickets were reviewed by hand. If a driver's handwriting was misread or a return wasn't logged correctly, the asset effectively disappeared from the record: still sitting at a customer site, generating no revenue, flagged nowhere. In other cases, customers continued receiving billing for cylinders they had already returned — a quieter problem, but one with consequences.
"If you're not billing people correctly, that's when customers could start to lose their trust in you," Smith said.
The core failure was architecture, not effort. Huber's systems tracked transactions but not physical assets. Every handoff that happened outside the system (and there were many) created a gap the team had to chase manually. At scale, those gaps added up.
After seeing TrackAbout demonstrated at an industry event in 2018, Huber requested a demo. Implementation began at the smaller Ames branch and focused first on cryogenic cylinders, the highest-value assets in the fleet, before expanding to the full industrial inventory.
The initial barcode tagging was labor-intensive: every asset had to be labeled and entered before the system could do its work. Smith is direct about that tradeoff: "It was a lot of work getting everything up and running, but I would totally redo it again. From where we've come from to now, everything's improved so much."
Once live, the operational model changed. Every delivery, transfer, and return is captured through a scan; there is no keying, no paper cross-checking, no lag between what happens in the field and what the record shows. Huber now uses TrackAbout's Proof of Delivery (POD) and Rental, Dynamic Workflows, and Palletization modules across approximately 30,000 cylinders.
The commitment ran deep enough to drive an infrastructure decision: Huber switched its ERP to a platform that could integrate directly with TrackAbout via API. The tracking system improved the operation and it became the standard around which the rest of the stack was built.
The improvements surfaced within weeks: gas return processing dropped from two hours per day to 30 minutes — a 75% reduction that freed staff from daily reconciliation work.
Billing accuracy improved sharply. Errors that had been invisible became visible almost immediately: returns not logged, customers billed for cylinders they no longer held, assets sitting idle at customer locations without any flag in the system. "It was really surprising in the first couple of months to see just how many mistakes we would catch," Smith said.
The financial recovery was concrete. Within the first year, Huber ran tank audits against the new visibility data, identified customers who were overstocked or holding unused cylinders, and brought those assets back into circulation. "$30,000 worth of assets," Smith said. "Some customers hadn't returned them — they were just sitting there idle. It was insane the money we were able to save."
Compliance is also cleaner because documentation that once existed as physical paper is now fully digitized and accessible in real time. Staff can confirm immediately where an asset is, who signed for it, and when it last moved, reducing the conditions for mistakes and customer disputes.
Datacor's involvement didn't end at go-live, and Smith is clear that the support has been consistent across the years since. "We've had amazing support from TrackAbout consultants. Even now, we're able to reach out with questions and talk things through. It's been a really successful project, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it."
Founded in 1939, Huber Supply Company is a family-owned welding and gas distributor headquartered in Mason City, Iowa, with branches in Ames, Iowa and Owatonna, Minnesota. The company serves the industrial gas industry with delivery services, equipment repair, and training.