A paper trail where there was never any paper.

The client is a power producer with twelve biomass power plants across Punjab, Haryana and Rajasthan. They burn agricultural residue, mainly paddy straw, without stopping. The fuel arrives by truck and tractor-trolley from farmers, balers and aggregators, at the plants and at 26 fuel centres around them.

How it ran before

Very little of this buying looks like a purchase order. A farmer can arrive at one in the morning with a loaded trolley and no contract. A broker may already have paid him in cash. Some fuel sits on a vendor’s own land for months, bought with an advance.

The record of all this lived in several places. Weighbridge slips carried handwritten moisture readings and rubber stamps. Lab results for loose fuel went to a WhatsApp group, one message per sample. Plant teams kept stock and consumption in spreadsheets. Where a load was stacked was agreed verbally. In peak season, staff could not raise one invoice per trolley by hand.

What we built

Jetbro built the power producer’s fuel management system on Phlo. It follows the fuel from end to end: vendor onboarding, bargains (the purchase contracts), the trip through the plant, quality, invoices, payment proposals, and stock by stack and on the belt that feeds the furnace.

Each action is stored as an event, and every screen is a view of those events. Approvals run through chains set per plant and land in one queue.

How a truck moves through it

Every vehicle’s visit is a trip. A trip passes six checkpoints. Each belongs to a role, and each one unlocks the next.

1. Gate entry. The gate operator scans a reusable QR sticker for the vehicle, picks the bargain and the material, and records the vehicle and driver.
2. Quality. The quality user enters ten moisture readings, a dust value and photos. Once entered, the readings are hidden from operators on the ground.
3. Gross weight. The weighbridge operator records the loaded weight. It cannot be recorded until the required quality checks are done. Every weight is labelled as read from the weighbridge or typed by hand.
4. Unloading. The unloading supervisor records where the load went (a stack, the shed or the belt), who unloaded it, and sixteen more moisture readings.
5. Tare weight. The weighbridge operator weighs the empty truck. This step is locked until an unloading record exists.
6. Exit. The gate operator confirms the exit and takes the sticker back.

At the exit the trip completes. Stock is credited to the stack, and a purchase invoice is parked in the accountant’s review queue with the deductions and the tax already worked out. Nobody types it.

What the first build described

A first build is where an operation gets written down: the things it tracks, what can happen to each of them, and the cases that do not fit.

The things the business tracks:

• A vendor. A person or a firm, verified and approved once, holding one or more roles: baler, transporter, aggregator, overhead vendor.
• A bargain. The purchase contract. There are four types: normal stacking, self-stacking, transporter and direct. One bargain can carry several material lines.
• A trip. One vehicle’s visit, from the gate in to the gate out. It carries a trip token, and a reusable QR sticker goes on the vehicle for the visit.
• A stack. A numbered pile in a yard or at a fuel centre, holding one material at a time.
• A policy and a published rate. The quality slabs for a material and plant, and the approved walk-in rate for a date range.
• An invoice and a payment proposal. What is owed for a trip, and the run that pays it.

What can happen to them, in the system’s own words:

• To a bargain: created, submitted, approval recorded, activated, amended, expired, closed.
• To a trip: gate entry recorded, quality recorded, quality breach raised, breach decided, gross weight recorded, material unloaded, tare weight recorded, then completed, rejected or cancelled, and exit recorded.
• To stock: trolley moved to belt, stack moved to stack, stack quality checked, stack deficit recorded.
• To money: purchase invoice parked, service invoice parked, invoice posted, debit note raised, advance payment recorded, payment proposal created and submitted, proposal approval recorded, proposal exported, payment recorded.

The cases that do not fit a purchase order were modelled, not worked around:

• The walk-in farmer. Each plant publishes an approved rate per material, and its aggregator holds a standing direct bargain at that rate. When a trolley arrives with no contract, the gate operator attaches that bargain and the trip runs like any other.
• Fuel stored on the vendor’s land. A self-stacking bargain covers it. The physical verification of the stock is recorded, and so is the advance paid against it.
• Supplying through someone else. A vendor can be linked to a parent vendor for supply, for payment, or both, so the record shows who delivered and who is paid.
• The rejected load. A rejected trip still leaves through the gate, so the vehicle is released. No invoice results.
• Loose fuel. It has no moisture reading at the gate. A lab operator enters the lab result against the trip. A result inside policy is accepted automatically, and a failing one goes to a decision.
• Fuel moved between sites. A shifting trip is one trip across two sites, with a sticker for each leg. Stock leaves the origin stack when the truck exits the origin, and enters the destination stack when it exits there.

Quality rules, held as policy

Deductions for moisture and dust are slabs in a policy, set per material and plant and approved before they take effect. In the wet season, a temporary special policy for a plant overrides the standing one for its dates, automatically.

Pricing takes the highest moisture and the highest dust recorded at any checkpoint and looks them up in the governing policy. Once a trip is priced, its policy and price are frozen.

A reading outside policy raises a quality breach. The operator can hold and re-record, reject the load, or send it up the approval chain, where the first approver sets the deduction. A breach at unloading blocks the tare weight and the exit until it is decided.

The same discipline applies beyond quality. Bargains, published rates, policies and payment proposals each pass through an approval chain before they take effect, and a change to an active bargain goes through an amendment approval.

What the record makes possible

Every purchase invoice parked at the gate traces back to its trip, and every trip to the people who weighed it, sampled it and decided its deduction, with the time of each step. The audit trail is the data itself, and it can be searched.

Stock is the same record read another way. Feeding the belt and burning the fuel are recorded as they happen. When a stack empties, the difference between what went in and what came out is recorded as a deficit.

Head office reads from the same events: a wall of plant cards shows procurement against target, stock in hand, days of cover, fuel quality and trip cycle time.

What the foundation carries forward

The description above is the lasting part of a first build. Vendors, bargains, trips and stacks are defined. The roles at each checkpoint and the approval chains per plant exist. Every weighment, reading and decision the system has recorded is kept, in order.

A further process for an operation like this would start from that, not from an empty page. Another plant or fuel centre is a new branch of the same organisation tree, with its checkpoints and approval chain set as configuration. A new process is a new set of events added to the same history.