Logistics
5 min readHB Nexus
A washing robot without software is a machine that washes but cannot tell you what it did. In food, pharma and chemicals that is half a solution, because the question after every wash cycle is not only whether the trailer is clean but whether you can prove it. This article explains what trailer washing software has to do, what Nuvix records for every HB Nexus wash cycle and why HB Group built the machine and the software as one system.
Three things, in the order they happen on the yard. It has to plan: which vehicle goes into the wash when, with which programme. It has to register: what actually happened, to which vehicle, for how long. And it has to invoice: turn the registered wash cycles into an invoice without anyone retyping them. Nuvix does exactly those three things, plus a fourth that ties them together: a customer portal in which every wash cycle can be found again.
Most administrative work in a manual wash bay sits between those steps. Someone writes down which trailer was washed, someone else looks it up for the invoice, and a third person searches for it months later when an auditor asks. Software that connects planning, registration and invoicing removes those hand-overs.
Every HB Nexus wash cycle produces a digital HACCP certificate in Nuvix. It has five fields, and none of them is filled in by hand.
| Field | What it records | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Wash cycle number | A unique number per wash cycle | One registration can be found without discussion |
| Licence plate | The vehicle that was washed | Links the cleaning to a trailer, not just to a date |
| Programme | Which wash programme ran | Shows which cleaning was applied for that type of load |
| Duration | How long the cycle actually ran | An aborted or shortened cycle stands out immediately |
| Status | Whether the cycle was completed and registered | No wash cycle is finished until it is recorded |
The certificate is created the moment the cycle is completed. There is no step in which the driver or an employee confirms anything, so there is no step that can be forgotten. And because the record is created by the machine at the time of the wash cycle, it cannot be completed or corrected afterwards. That is the difference between a logbook and evidence.
An audit costs time at the moment someone has to search. In the Nuvix customer portal all certificates are searchable per vehicle and per date. If an auditor asks for a licence plate over a certain period, that is a filter and an export. No folder, no phone call to the colleague who was on shift that day. Audit preparation stops being a project.
A wash cycle on the HB Nexus takes a maximum of 15 minutes and the machine runs 24/7 without staff at the wash site. A planner therefore works with a fixed block per vehicle instead of an estimate that depends on who is washing. Because Nuvix plans the wash cycles as well as registering them, the planned cycle and the registered cycle are the same record: what was scheduled is what the certificate later shows.
One unit can handle up to around 33,000 wash cycles per year. Whether you use that capacity for your own fleet, for third parties or for both, the invoicing follows from the same registration. There is no separate list of washed trailers to reconcile at the end of the month.
HB Group started in 2017 as a truck wash operator at the Maasvlakte and Europoort. The Nexus was built to take the manual work out of the cargo space, and Nuvix was built alongside it because a wash cycle nobody can prove is worth less than a wash cycle that is recorded. When the hardware and the software come from the same family, there is no integration between the two that can break: a wash cycle is only finished once it has been registered.
The same connection is used for service. Maintenance of the Nexus runs through a service agreement with HB Group, with remote monitoring via wifi and automatic software updates. Faults can be read out remotely, so an engineer already knows what is going on before arriving.
For Nuvix the answer to each of those is built into the way the Nexus works. If you want to see it, book a demo: you see a full wash cycle from docking to certificate, and you see the certificate appear in the portal.
Frequently asked questions
Nuvix is the software behind the HB Nexus. It plans, registers and invoices every wash cycle, creates a HACCP certificate per wash cycle and keeps those certificates searchable per vehicle and per date in a customer portal.
Yes. Every wash cycle automatically produces a digital HACCP certificate via Nuvix. All certificates are searchable in the customer portal, per vehicle and per date.
No. It is created by the machine at the moment of the wash cycle and then stored in Nuvix. There is no manual entry that can be updated later.
The Nexus connects to Nuvix and the two are built as one system. Ask us about your situation during a demo; we would rather explain it than make a claim here we cannot back up.
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