When the vessel decides your day, the board should know where the vessel is.
Container haulage runs on someone else's schedule. The ship is early, the ship is late, the terminal slot moves, and every truck planned around it moves with it. A dispatch board that only knows what was planned this morning is out of date by lunchtime.
The ETA follows the ship.
Vessel positions are polled from AIS on a cycle, so a transit point tied to a sailing updates itself when the ship does. The estimate on the board is the ship's estimate, not the one someone was given on the phone yesterday.
- Vessel AIS positions polled through the day
- Ferry and rail legs held as transit points with their own timing
- The order's arrival estimate moving when the vessel's does
- The customer's tracking link showing the same thing the dispatcher sees
The slot follows the ship, on its own.
This is a relationship between two times, not two places. A terminal slot booked this morning against a sailing that has since slipped is a truck sitting in a queue, and the board should have moved when the ship did.
Waiting time is money, so it is recorded as money.
Demurrage is the part of container work most often lost. It happens at a terminal, it is noticed by a driver, and it is billed by someone who was not there. Waiting is captured against the stop where it happened, so it can be billed as waiting time rather than argued about a month later.
- Waiting time tracked per stop, on the order it belongs to
- Billed through the same invoice as the transport itself
- Auto-advance timestamps from the truck's own position rather than a recollection
- An audit trail per invoice when the charge is questioned
Container surfaces switch on for the companies that need them.
A general freight fleet should not have to look at vessels, and a container operator should not have to explain why half the screen is irrelevant. Feature gates decide per company which board a user gets, so the product matches the work without being configured into a maze.
Questions people actually ask.
- Where do the vessel positions come from?
- AIS data, polled on a schedule and attached to the transit point for that sailing, so the order's estimate moves with the ship.
- How is demurrage recorded?
- As waiting time against the specific stop where it happened, using the arrival and departure the truck's own position produced, and billed on the order's invoice.
- We run boxes and general freight together. Is that two accounts?
- No. Mixed fleets run both boards in one account with one set of trucks and drivers.
- Do the drivers need a different app?
- No. The same driver app carries the route and the stop sequence, whatever is on the trailer.
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Show us a week where the ship moved.
That is the week worth looking at. Book a call and we will run it on the board.