For Drayage Providers

Dispatch only when it is safe.

Dispatch is a bet you are already placing. Ava makes the bet visible, defensible, and earlier.

Used by drayage and intermodal operators across West Coast, Gulf, and East Coast ports.

The morning copy/paste runs every day. Three lookups, three answers. The dispatch clock and the appointment clock are on different timelines.

  • Morning copy/paste reconciliationOne person opens yesterday's vessel schedule, pastes today's underneath, finds changes by eye. She handed it off two months ago. The new person hates it.
  • Three-times-a-day manual lookup ritualEvery terminal site, every carrier portal, every appointment system. Checked at 7:30 AM, 10 AM, and 3 PM. The dispatch call still gets made on partial information.
  • Screenshot archive for per-diem disputesDaily downloads stored locally. Steamship lines only accept terminal-source screenshots. Without them, the dispute is already lost.
  • TMS auto-population not trustedERD and cutoff fields populate automatically. They have been wrong enough times that the team double-checks every booking against the carrier/terminal sites anyway.
  • T-1 dispatch clock vs T-3 appointment clockDispatch is committed the afternoon prior. Appointments are booked 2 to 3 days out under terminal scarcity. When the window moves, both clocks are misaligned simultaneously.
  • Bunched vessels, finite gate throughputWhen ERD drift pushes multiple vessels onto the same day, gate capacity collapses without reducing the load. Trucks arrive on time, wait in line, and blow the grace period.

How drayage teams use TradeLanes

Three stages from terminal signal to verified dispatch.

Step 01

See the terminal, not just the carrier

VSR by Terminal shows ERD and CY cutoff movement at the terminal level. Not what the carrier publishes. What the terminal is actually doing.

Step 02

Know when the window actually opens

Verified Windows gives you terminal-verified ERDs and flags carrier-terminal conflicts before you commit the dispatch.

Step 03

Safe-to-Gate before the truck moves

Ava evaluates whether it is safe to dispatch to this terminal right now, based on terminal volatility patterns, service history, and the current window state.

The product path for drayage

Visibility -- Signal -- Decision -- Execution. One operating system for the dispatch decision.

Signal

VSR

What changed

Decision

Ava / Safe-to-Gate

Is it safe to dispatch

Verification

Verified Windows

Trust the window

Execution

Lexi, Navi, and Verra

A.I. agents that execute AES filings, Shipping Instructions, and BL proofing

By invitation only

How drayage teams are already operating differently

Two drayage operators, in their own words.

Regional Drayage Provider

Our customers tell us they hear about changes first from us - before their steamship line or even their freight forwarder.

Dispatch Operations

Regional Drayage & Trucking Company

We do not have to go to nine different terminal website pages. We get it all in one.

Owner-Operator

Frequently asked questions

The cargo receiving window is the period during which a terminal will accept a loaded export container against a specific vessel. It is bounded by the Earliest Receiving Date (ERD) on the front end and the CY Cut on the back end. ERD is the terminal's call. CY Cut is the carrier's call. Both have to hold for the dispatch to be safe.

ERD is owned by the terminal. It reflects what the gate, yard, and crane can do today. CY Cut is owned by the carrier. It is the commercial deadline against vessel cutoff. The two are pulled from different systems updated at different times. Both are "current" until one of them is not. The terminal-source value is what you need for per-diem disputes. The carrier-source value is what your booking system shows. VSR fuses them with confidence scoring so you plan against one window, not two contradictory ones.

Safe-to-Gate is Ava's verdict on whether it is safe to dispatch a truck to the terminal right now. It checks the terminal-verified ERD, reconciles your T-1 dispatch clock with the T-3 appointment clock, flags bunched-vessel risk when ERD drift collapses gate throughput, and triggers re-dispatch alerts if the window shifts after initial clearance. When it says Hold, the recommendation includes the specific pattern driving the posture so the dispatcher knows why.

The two-clock collision is exactly where the failed-gate cost lands today. VSR gives the dispatch team a daily delta report to catch overnight changes. Ava produces the afternoon-prior Safe-to-Gate call so the appointment booked T-3 can be re-validated against the window state at T-1. If the appointment is no longer valid, you get the alternative before the truck moves.

Bunched vessels are explicitly tracked. When historical vessel-bunching at your specific terminal correlates with failed-gate rates, the Safe-to-Gate call surfaces the bunching context and recommends an earlier or later in-gate slot. The signal is on the surface, not buried in the noise.

The bill arrives, the carrier portal has been updated dozens of times, the terminal page has no history, your emails are archived, and nobody on your team remembers what the schedule said when the dispatch call was made. VSR's automatic snapshotting solves this. Every carrier and terminal page state is preserved at the moment of relevant decisions, with terminal-source attribution, indexed by booking. A year later, you open the dispute with the source record intact and a record of what you knew when you decided.

No. TMS and PortPro handle dispatch records, driver assignment, billing, and the operational system of record. VSR and Ava handle the decision-timing layer that sits on top of those: when to dispatch, when to hold, when to re-dispatch. They feed each other. PortPro tells Ava which moves are queued for tomorrow. Ava tells PortPro which ones need re-validation before the truck rolls.

You can - and some large drayage operations do. Collecting the terminal and carrier data is the easy part; a capable automation team can stand up broad coverage in a few weeks. The part that breaks is everything after. When a terminal changes its data feed, someone has to notice and fix it quickly - a moving target with no perfect solution. Then you have to resolve conflicting terminal-versus-carrier dates - which source do you trust today? - and turn the raw data into a call your dispatchers can act on. And that is just the marine side: rail adds its own layer of ERDs and cutoffs that shift by carrier and by ramp - the same booking can flip between railroads, with a different cutoff and a different place to return the box. That upkeep, the source-of-truth scoring, and the decision layer are what TradeLanes runs for you: the feed is checked hourly and recovered within the hour when a source changes, so your team dispatches on data they did not have to build or babysit.

What breaks when you build it yourself

You can collect the data. Three things after that are where it comes apart.

01

The upkeep

When a terminal changes its data feed, someone has to notice and fix it quickly. Even a dedicated automation team calls it a moving target with no perfect solution. We check hourly and recover within the hour.

02

The source of truth

Terminal and carrier publish different dates for the same vessel. Which do you trust today? We fuse them with confidence scoring so you plan against one window, not two contradictory ones.

03

The decision

Raw data is not a dispatch call. Turning it into a safe-to-gate verdict your team acts on takes years of this data - and that is the part we run.

Dispatch with confidence.

VSR shows what changed at your terminals. Ava tells you when it is safe to dispatch, with timestamped terminal-source evidence retained for per-diem defense.

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Exporters and logistics partners already operating on TradeLanes

StoneXIMC LogisticsCapay Canyon RanchAvanti Nut