Beyond Detection

How Otodata’s new dashboard feature helps UCO collectors measure and map theft.

My article in the Winter 2026 edition of Biobased Diesel® described how Otodata is making tank telemetry accessible to used cooking oil (UCO) collectors of every size. Since then, Otodata has rolled out a new dashboard feature that deserves its own conversation, one that addresses a quiet but persistent problem in UCO operations—the inability of telemetry data alone to distinguish a legitimate collection from a theft. Now, a simple classification tool turns tank telemetry into theft insight.

The new feature is straightforward in concept but powerful in practice. When a tank’s level drops, Otodata’s dashboard now allows collectors to flag the event as either a valid collection (one performed by their own company) or a theft (one performed by someone else). It’s a small piece of interface with significant implications—because for the first time, collectors can not only detect drawdown events, but also categorize, count and analyze them.

For an industry where theft losses are typically estimated rather than measured, that distinction matters.

The Limits of Pure Telemetry

Tank telemetry is excellent at detecting what is happening inside a tank: rising or falling levels, sudden drops and gradual fills. What it cannot do by itself is explain why those changes happened.

Consider a typical scenario. A monitor reports that a tank dropped from 80 percent full to 35 percent full overnight. Was that one of the company’s trucks running an emergency pickup that wasn’t on the official route? Was it a contracted hauler completing a service on the company’s behalf? Or was it an unauthorized truck siphoning oil from the tank under cover of darkness?

Telemetry cannot answer those questions on its own. Even GPS-enabled monitors—which can confirm whether a device has moved, but not who moved it—leave gaps. The signature of a theft and that of a legitimate collection often look nearly identical from a sensor’s point of view: a fast, large draw on the tank.

The result is that collectors have historically had to choose between two imperfect approaches. They could treat every unexplained drawdown as a possible theft, which generates noise and false alarms. Or they could ignore drawdowns that didn’t match an obvious red flag, which allows real thefts to slip past unrecorded. Neither approach produces a reliable picture of how much theft is actually occurring.

Closing the Loop: Valid Collection or Theft?

Otodata’s new classification feature closes that loop by combining the strength of telemetry—real-time event detection—with the irreplaceable value of human knowledge: the dispatcher or operations manager who can confirm whether an event matches the day’s actual collection activity.

When a drawdown event appears in the Otodata dashboard, the user is presented with a simple option: Was this collection yours, or wasn’t it? With a single click, the event is tagged. Over time, those tags accumulate into a running ledger of every drawdown the system has ever seen, sorted into legitimate activity on one side and confirmed theft on the other.

This is exactly the kind of data that has been missing in UCO operations. Most collectors today track theft anecdotally—a driver mentions an unexpectedly empty tank, an account manager hears a complaint from a restaurant about an unfamiliar truck, a steady producer suddenly produces much less. Anecdotes are useful, but they can’t add up to numbers. They don’t reveal trends or appear in reports.

The Otodata classification feature changes this by quietly building a list that does add up to numbers. And once collectors have numbers, they can start making decisions based on evidence.

From Suspicions to a Theft Profile

Once classification data accumulates, collectors start to see things like:

• Which specific sites are being hit repeatedly, even when individual incidents seemed isolated.

• Which geographic areas concentrate the most theft activity.

• What days and times are likely for theft.

• How theft volume changes seasonally or against UCO market prices.

• Whether theft is rising or falling year over year.

This kind of information is the practical foundation for prevention. A single stolen tank is a frustration. A documented pattern of three or four thefts at the same restaurant cluster, all on Sunday nights between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m., is a signal that can drive a real response—whether that means installing additional security, adjusting collection schedules, coordinating with neighboring collectors or providing credible information to local law enforcement.

Without measurement, theft prevention is reactive. With measurement, it becomes strategic.

Beyond the Restaurant: Monitoring Bulk Tanks at the Plant

One thing that sets Otodata apart in the UCO-monitoring space is its support for the large bulk tanks that sit at collector facilities. Most monitoring vendors in the industry focus exclusively on the restaurant side—the smaller tanks behind kitchens—and leave the plant side unmonitored or handled by a different system entirely. Otodata covers both with the same platform.

For theft tracking, that capability matters more than it might first appear. With monitors on both the restaurant tanks and the bulk tanks at the plant, collectors can begin to reconcile the two ends of the chain. The system can show how much UCO left a route’s restaurant tanks on a given day and how much actually landed in the plant’s receiving tanks that evening. Meaningful discrepancies—beyond what is reasonable for in-truck residue or measurement variance—become visible.

That opens a second front for theft accountability. Restaurant-side classification catches unauthorized collections at the source. Bulk-tank reconciliation catches losses that occur in transit: skimming, unrecorded transfers or errors in receiving paperwork. Together, the two layers give collectors something the industry has rarely had—a defensible measure of total UCO loss across the entire operation.

Bigger Implications: Insurance, Law Enforcement, Supply Chain Trust

Quantified theft data has value well beyond internal operations. Collectors who experience meaningful theft losses often discover that their ability to recover those losses—through insurance claims, civil action or law-enforcement engagement—depends heavily on documentation. Vague reports of “ongoing theft” are difficult to act on. Detailed, time-stamped records of specific incidents with confirmed volumes and locations are far more credible.

The classification feature also supports the broader push for transparency across the biobased diesel value chain. Renewable diesel and biodiesel producers increasingly need confidence in the chain of custody for the feedstocks they purchase. Collectors who can demonstrate not only how much UCO they recovered, but also how rigorously they tracked anomalies in that recovery, have a credibility advantage that can matter at the negotiating table.

The Right Time for Better Theft Data

UCO is more valuable today than it has ever been, and the financial incentive for theft has scaled along with it. At the same time, downstream buyers are demanding more rigorous documentation, and operating margins for collectors are under continuous pressure from labor and fuel costs.

In that environment, the ability to track theft accurately is no longer a curiosity—it is part of running a serious modern UCO operation. Otodata’s new classification feature gives collectors the tool they need to do that tracking with minimal effort, building on the telemetry investment they have already made.

Detection has been solved. Now collectors can begin to do something arguably more valuable: measure, understand and ultimately reduce the theft they have always known was happening but could never quite count.

Author: Eric Wise

Vice President of Commercial Solutions

Otodata Inc.

412-779-9998

ewise@otodata.com