What it does
CFL Lamu sits between fleet owners and their fuel cards / pump operators. Every refuel is logged with vehicle, driver, location and odometer; suspicious patterns (over-fills, odo regressions, off-route stations) escalate to the fleet manager in real time.
Highlights
- Pump-side telemetry flow-rate sensors on the dispensing nozzle log litres pumped, second by second, into the dispatch event stream.
- Vehicle-side GPS + OBD-II speed, fuel level, mileage, engine hours streamed back to the platform every 30 seconds.
- Cross-correlation engine the platform joins pump events with vehicle traces to verify "this vehicle was at this pump for this much fuel" anomalies surface as alerts.
- Driver attribution RFID / iButton at the pump identifies the driver authorising the refuel; the bill is tied to a person, not a vehicle.
- Geo-fenced authorised stations refuels outside the route polygon flag for review; saves the "drove to the village station" loophole.
- Fleet manager mobile app alerts, daily fuel-burn vs distance, top consumers / outliers all on the phone.
- Cost reports by route, vehicle, driver, time period exportable to the bookkeeper without screenshots.
How we built it
The pump-side is OBD-II + a small board reading flow rate; the vehicle-side is a hardened GPS unit. Both speak the same MQTT topology to a Laravel ingest worker that reconciles fuel events with location traces. The fleet dashboard is a Vue SPA over the same API; alerts are pushed via WebSocket so the fleet manager sees an over-fill within seconds of the nozzle clicking off.
Behind the scenes
- Pump events buffer locally if the cellular link drops five minutes of dispensing isn't lost when the network blinks.
- Trip reconstruction runs nightly: GPS traces are smoothed, distance computed, fuel-burn per km calculated, outliers flagged.
- Hardware-failure detection: a vehicle that hasn't reported in 4 hours during work hours alerts so the engineer can check the unit before the driver "happens to forget".
What changed for the client
Fuel mismanagement losses dropped sharply once drivers knew every litre was triangulated. The savings paid for the kit inside two months across the pilot fleet and the cost reports made the monthly accounting close go from a 4-day tape-out to a 30-minute review.