Establish the requested purchase or exchange and the kiosk location.
Enterprise retail platform
Propane Kiosks
The Home Depot | AmeriGas
I built and supported reservation and dispensing logic for The Home Depot's propane kiosk platform across over 2,000 stores. The customer-facing workflow coordinated physical kiosk hardware with payments, accounting, and inventory state from reservation through cylinder release.
Distributed systemsHardware integrationPayment processingTransaction workflowsRetail automation
Over 2,000Stores supported
Reservation → ReleaseEnd-to-end transaction ownership
Digital + PhysicalSoftware coordinated with kiosk hardware
Transaction lifecycle
One customer action crossed several system boundaries.
A successful exchange depended on customer intent, money movement, available physical inventory, kiosk state, and a financially accountable result remaining synchronized.
Coordinate the transaction with payment and customer-facing systems.
Drive the correct hardware action while protecting transaction state.
Align inventory, accounting, and the final customer outcome.
The engineering problem
A transaction was not complete until the physical outcome matched the digital record.
A reservation could begin in software, but fulfillment depended on real equipment at a specific store. Payments, kiosk availability, cylinder inventory, release commands, and accounting records all described different parts of the same customer transaction.
The platform needed to preserve a consistent outcome when those systems responded at different times or when a physical action could not complete as expected.
My contribution
Reservation and dispensing logic at fleet scale.
- Developed workflows spanning reservation, authorization, dispensing, and completion.
- Integrated enterprise services with store-level propane kiosk hardware.
- Coordinated payment, accounting, and inventory state around physical cylinder release.
- Supported customer-facing production behavior across over 2,000 stores.
- Handled the boundary between recoverable software transactions and real-world outcomes.
The physical edge
Software had to produce a safe, understandable action in the real world.
Self-service exchange replaces an associate-assisted cage unlock with a transaction that can reserve inventory, accept payment, open the appropriate compartment, receive an empty cylinder, release a full cylinder, and record the result.
Why retailers offer self-service exchange
Public perspective
The value appears in the customer experience.
Self-serve propane exchange kiosks are mostly hands-off, so your employees don't need to do any unlocking, swapping, or ringing up.
Amazing! Never had to walk into the store and wait for an associate to help. Had my exchange in 2 minutes!
Public case-study boundary
Production ownership, responsibly presented.
This work was completed as a Home Depot employee. The case study intentionally omits proprietary architecture, source code, vendor protocols, payment details, internal metrics, operational procedures, and safety-control implementation.