Case Study
Helium Operations.
20% of global supply.
The system that tracks every ISO container, every custody transfer, and every molecule across the largest helium distribution network in the world.
01 — The Operation
Industrial gas at global scale
Helium is a non-renewable resource extracted as a byproduct of natural gas processing. The supply chain spans extraction plants, purification facilities, distribution hubs, and end customers across multiple continents. The operation manages roughly 20% of the world's helium supply.
Every ISO container — a 40-foot tube trailer carrying compressed helium — moves through a chain of custody involving multiple operators, carriers, and facilities. Each transfer requires documentation, measurement reconciliation, and compliance tracking. At this scale, a single misplaced container or unreconciled delivery can mean six-figure exposure.
02 — The Problem
Spreadsheets don't scale to 20% of global supply
How many phone calls does it take to find one container? How many spreadsheets does your team reconcile before the books close?
Before Cosmos, the operation ran on spreadsheets, email chains, and manual reconciliation. Every custody transfer required phone calls to confirm receipt. Every invoice required cross-referencing delivery tickets against purchase orders against plant meter readings. Month-end reconciliation took days — sometimes weeks — because discrepancies had to be traced back through paper trails and email threads.
The cost was not just time. It was visibility. Plant managers could not answer basic questions in real time: Where are our containers? Which deliveries are unreconciled? What is our actual inventory position right now? The information existed, but it was scattered across people, inboxes, and spreadsheets that were already stale by the time they were compiled.
Off-the-shelf ERP systems were evaluated and rejected. They required months of customization to model helium-specific primitives — ISO container types, purity grades, custody chain requirements, plant-specific measurement protocols. By the time you customize a generic ERP enough to handle helium operations, you have built a custom system anyway — but on a foundation that fights you at every step.
03 — The Constellations
Four patterns, one coherent system
01
Asset Tracking
Every ISO container modeled with location, custody state, purity grade, pressure readings, and maintenance history. Real-time visibility across the entire fleet — not a report that was accurate yesterday.
02
Transaction Management
Custody transfers, invoicing, and multi-party reconciliation. Every delivery generates a structured transaction with measurement data, timestamps, and participant confirmation — replacing email chains with auditable records.
03
Data Modeling
Domain-specific models for helium operations: container types, purity grades, facility configurations, carrier relationships, pricing structures. The system speaks the language of the operation, not generic ERP vocabulary.
04
Identity & Access
Multi-tenant isolation between operators, carriers, and facility managers. Each participant sees their view of the operation — their containers, their deliveries, their reconciliation status — without exposing competitive information.
04 — The Result
$50M projected value. From days to minutes.
The projected ROI on this deployment is $50 million over ten years — a 10x return on the system investment. Month-end reconciliation dropped from days to minutes. Every custody transfer is recorded at the moment it happens, with measurement data attached. Discrepancies surface immediately — not three weeks later when someone is trying to close the books.
Plant managers can answer “where are our containers?” in real time, from any device. The fleet is visible, the transactions are auditable, and the compliance documentation generates itself from the operational data that already exists in the system.
— Plant Operations Manager, Fortune 10 energy company
See how this applies to your operation.
If you manage physical assets across a distributed supply chain, the same patterns that run helium operations can model yours.