Tanker delivery is one of the few municipal services with almost no independent record of performance. Runs are recorded on paper, litres are self-declared, and the only signal that a ward was skipped is a councillor's phone ringing. That makes three things hard: confirming that a scheduled run actually happened, defending the unit in a council meeting, and telling a resident when water is actually coming.
One depot, its wards and its tankers, running the full loop for 90 days: resident request → command dispatch → driver acceptance → GPS and litre check-in → ward-visible confirmation. Every stage is timestamped and exportable.
- Driver app with GPS check-in inside a 100 m radius of the registered tank
- Litres offloaded and litres remaining recorded per stop
- Evidence photographs on disputed stops
- Command dashboard scoped to the depot — other depots see nothing
- Resident ward feed with coarse status bands, never live driver positions
- Councillor read-only view of their own ward
- Weekly escalation sweep with queued councillor notifications
- Daily CSV audit export, with optional unit-cost reporting if tariffs are supplied
Days 1–14
Set-up and staff onboarding
- Load the depot's wards, distribution points and community tanks
- Import the depot staff register so employee numbers auto-fill at sign-up
- Verify drivers and issue command logins (municipality or depot-scoped)
- Sign the POPIA operator agreement and publish the processing notice
Days 15–30
Driver adoption
- Every tanker run is checked in on the phone: GPS, litres offloaded, litres remaining
- Evidence photograph on disputed or partial stops
- Baseline captured: current delivery rate, missed days and complaint volume
Days 31–60
Resident and councillor loop
- Residents in the pilot wards sign in and raise ward-level water requests
- Command converts requests into jobs; drivers accept them in the field
- Ward councillors receive read-only access to their own ward
- Escalation sweep runs weekly and queues a message to the ward councillor
Days 61–90
Measure and report
- Verified delivery rate compared against the Day 15–30 baseline
- Litres delivered (verified) compared against the depot's own recorded litres
- Written before/after report handed to the depot manager and the Information Officer
- Go / no-go decision on extending to the remaining depots
| Indicator | Definition |
|---|---|
| Verified delivery rate | % of scheduled ward-days with a GPS-confirmed check-in |
| Missed-day streaks | Wards with 2+ consecutive scheduled days and no check-in |
| Request → dispatch time | Hours from a resident request to a posted job |
| Dispatch → delivery time | Hours from driver acceptance to verified offload |
| Litres verified vs litres recorded | A like-for-like check against the depot's own paperwork |
| Fleet utilisation | Active hours per tanker against an 8-hour shift |
| Complaint volume | Unique ward complaints, de-duplicated on a 4-hour window |
| Optional unit costs | Cost per litre and per delivery, only if the depot supplies tariff figures |
The pilot is judged a success if the verified delivery rate improves against the Day 15–30 baseline and every run in the depot has an independent, timestamped record for the first time.
- One nominated depot and its ward list
- A staff register (employee number, name, role) for that depot
- Drivers with a smartphone able to run a web app — no installation required
- A named depot manager as pilot owner and the Information Officer's sign-off
- Optional: current tanker tariff figures, only if the depot wants unit costs shown
- The platform, hosting and support for 90 days at no charge
- Onboarding sessions for drivers and command staff
- Weekly performance summary during the pilot
- A written before/after report at Day 90, owned by the municipality
The municipality is the responsible party; STERNMARK is the operator under section 20 of POPIA. Personal information is minimised, row-level access control is enforced in the database, councillor contact details are never exposed to a browser, and residents are never shown live driver positions. The full processing notice is published at /governance. An in-country hosting region can be provisioned on request before go-live.
There is no obligation to continue. If the municipality extends, AquaSure is a simple monthly subscription per active depot — no per-delivery fees, no percentage of spend and no savings-share arrangement. We make no claim about what the current process costs the municipality; the pilot is about visibility and accountability, and any cost figures are only ever the depot's own numbers shown back to it. All municipal data remains the municipality's property and is exportable as CSV at any time, during or after the pilot.
Stated plainly so nothing is oversold: outbound SMS and WhatsApp messages are queued and auditable but not yet transmitted — sending requires a licensed provider account in the municipality's name. USSD access for residents without data, telemetry integration with tanker flow meters, QR check-ins, and automated anomaly detection are designed for but not delivered in the 90 days.
A 45-minute session with the depot manager and one contractor representative to load the ward list and staff register. The pilot can be live within two weeks of that meeting.
AquaSure by STERNMARK Technologies · Water you can track, trust and verify.