LPG distributors operate in a world where physical assets and profitability are tightly connected. Cylinders sit at the center of that relationship. They carry the product, shape the customer experience, and represent a major long-term investment.
Yet in many organizations, attention gravitates toward filling plants, route planning, and pricing, while the cylinder fleet quietly stays in the background. Over time, that “background” asset can become a hidden source of cost, operational friction, and missed opportunity.
Cylinders move through plants, depots, transport partners, agents, and customer sites. Small gaps in process and documentation at each site add up. Assets linger longer than expected, drift away from records, or slip out of visibility altogether without a single dramatic event.
Industry bodies see the same pattern at global scale. The World Liquid Gas Association (WLGA) notes in its Guide to Good Industry Practices for LPG Cylinder Management that LPG is “one of those unique products where the packaging often costs more than the contents,” and estimates there are roughly 1.5 billion LPG cylinders in circulation worldwide. In other words, the vessel itself is one of the most valuable assets in the LPG value chain.
The positive news is that this is changing. Real-world examples, such as Empresas Gasco in Colombia, show how LPG distributors can regain control of very large fleets, improve compliance, and boost asset productivity by modernizing cylinder tracking with platforms like TrackAbout.
On paper, LPG cylinders can look simple: they are purchased, filled, inspected, and eventually retired. In practice, they behave more like a distributed infrastructure that spans the entire supply chain.
Cylinders are durable and long-lived. With appropriate design, handling, and maintenance, they can stay in service for many years. The WLGA’s Report on the Testing and Requalification of LPG Cylinders looks at practices across 15 countries and highlights why this matters: those markets alone account for roughly 1 billion cylinders—about two-thirds of the estimated global population—with unit costs typically between $10 and $100 each.
The challenge is visibility. Many LPG organizations can answer high-level questions easily:
But they struggle with questions that really drive performance:
That gap between what is owned and what is actively managed is where value leaks out of the business.
Cylinder loss rarely looks like a single dramatic incident. It is more often the cumulative result of everyday operations. Along the way, common realities can chip away at control:
None of these situations look like a crisis on their own. Taken together, they gradually separate system records from what is happening in the field. Many cylinders remain physically in the network, but they stop functioning as part of a coordinated, productive fleet.
When cylinder visibility is limited, the impact shows up in several areas at once.
Each cylinder represents a real investment. When assets are lost, misdirected, or damaged beyond repair earlier than expected, that investment is cut short, and the revenue that cylinder could have supported across its life is reduced or lost.
In its Report on the Testing and Requalification of LPG Cylinders, the WLGA estimates that requalifying cylinders across the 15 study countries would cost nearly $1 billion per year over a 30-year period. Anything that shortens cylinder life or pushes assets out of controlled circulation makes that spend less effective.
Uncertainty about where cylinders are and how quickly they return often leads to a predictable response: fleets are expanded “just in case.”
Depots and branches carry extra stock to guard against shortages. Cylinders accumulate as insurance against gaps in information. This helps avoid stockouts but ties up working capital in assets that may not be working as hard as they could.
With better visibility, especially into dwell times and returns, LPG distributors can right-size fleets, rebalance stock across regions, and free capital for plant upgrades, technology projects, and growth initiatives.
When cylinder counts do not align, people must bridge the gap. Teams invest time in:
This is effort that could otherwise go into optimizing routes, supporting key customers, or improving safety programs.
Without a reliable view of each cylinder’s history, inspection status and condition are harder to monitor. Some operations risk keeping out-of-test or damaged cylinders in circulation longer than intended. Others choose to scrap assets early as a precaution and lose remaining useful life.
Across its cylinder-management and distribution-channel guides, the WLGA emphasizes that cylinders must be designed, maintained, and requalified to withstand daily handling, extremes of temperature, and long service lives and that poor handling or weak inspection practices can cut that life short. The quality of data behind those decisions is a critical part of safety and compliance, not just of asset management.
LPG distributors are not ignoring cylinder tracking. Most already use a mix of systems and processes, such as:
These tools are essential. They handle sales, billing, inventory, and financial reporting at an aggregate level. Where they often struggle is at the level of individual assets.
Common limitations include:
Traditional systems were never designed to follow every single cylinder from fill plant to customer yard and back again, capturing all the lifecycle events in between. That is where a dedicated cylinder tracking platform can add a powerful new layer of visibility and control.
Modern LPG cylinder tracking solutions are built to complement, not replace existing ERP and logistics tools. They focus on what happens to each cylinder in the real world and then feed that information back into the systems the business already relies on.
A typical approach includes:
This shift from estimated counts to asset-level insight changes the nature of decision-making. Instead of asking “how many cylinders should be here,” LPG distributors can ask, “which cylinders are here, how long have they been here, and are they doing the job they were paid for?”
Empresas Gasco, Colombia’s leading LPG distributor, provides a practical example of what this looks like in the field. The company supplies LPG across diverse geographies and manages one of the largest cylinder fleets in the region.
As Colombian regulations raised the bar for traceability and audit-ready data, Empresas Gasco needed a way to maintain compliance while improving operational control. Early attempts with local software and manual tools could not provide a complete, real-time view of the fleet, particularly as the cylinder population grew.
Empresas Gasco selected TrackAbout as the backbone of its cylinder visibility and compliance strategy. Today, the company tracks around 1.5 million LPG cylinders in Colombia using TrackAbout, with a roadmap to extend coverage to approximately 2.5 million assets as the program expands. The platform is used to:
In higher-risk environments, Empresas Gasco’s teams use explosion-proof handheld devices; elsewhere, they use standard smartphones, both feeding data into the same central system. Leadership now works from a single, trusted source of truth about the LPG cylinder fleet, rather than stitching together partial records from multiple tools.
The result is stronger compliance, better control, and more productive assets. Regulators receive complete, audit-ready documentation on demand. Operations teams can see where cylinders are concentrated, how quickly they move, and where idle stock is building up. The fleet is healthier, more visible, and easier to manage.
When distributors add a specialized tracking platform like TrackAbout on top of their existing systems, several benefits typically emerge.
TrackAbout is built specifically for companies that depend on high-value, returnable containers, including LPG cylinders. Its role is to provide asset-level insight and control that traditional systems cannot easily deliver on their own.
In LPG operations, TrackAbout typically:
By making the physical reality of the fleet visible, TrackAbout helps LPG organizations turn cylinder management from a blind spot into a controllable, optimizable part of the business.
Across the LPG industry, many organizations are reaching the same conclusion: cylinder fleets are simply too valuable to manage with partial information. The combination of high asset cost, long service life, stricter regulations, and complex distribution chains makes visibility essential.
By adding a dedicated tracking layer such as TrackAbout alongside existing ERP and logistics tools, LPG distributors can turn long-standing blind spots into sources of insight. Lost and idle assets become easier to find. Fleets can be sized with greater confidence. Teams spend more time on meaningful work and less time chasing numbers.
The Empresas Gasco story illustrates what this looks like in practice. The full case study provides a detailed view of how one leading LPG distributor strengthened compliance, improved traceability, and boosted asset productivity with TrackAbout. Read the case study.
For LPG organizations looking to close the gap between what is owned on paper and what is performing in the field, specialized cylinder tracking platforms like TrackAbout offer a practical, proven way to turn invisible loss into measurable value and to make everyday work easier and more rewarding for the teams who manage these assets.
Talk with the TrackAbout team about your LPG network, see how other distributors are using asset-level data to reduce loss and improve utilization, and explore what a phased rollout could look like for your business. Request a demo to get started.