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 terminal and carrier 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.
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.
Know when the window actually opens
Verified Windows gives you terminal-verified ERDs and flags carrier-terminal conflicts before you commit the dispatch.
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.
VSR
What changed
Ava / Safe-to-Gate
Is it safe to dispatch
Verified Windows
Trust the window
Lexi, Navi, and Verra
Execute correctly
Coming nextHow drayage teams are already operating differently
Two customer stories. Same underlying shift.
The clerk-level morning reconciliation job has been displaced.
One person ran the morning copy/paste for years. She handed it off two months ago and the new person hates it. The delta-only change report at 7:30 AM replaces the ritual. The timestamped evidence archive replaces the screenshot folder. Dispatchers make decisions instead of finding information.
Booking-quantity decrement detection caught what the carrier did not announce.
A 30-container booking quietly decremented to 25. Without surface-level detection, the drayage shop arrives at the gate with the wrong count. The clerk job that catches these silent reductions runs about $60K per year, fully loaded, and still misses changes that arrive after dispatch is committed.
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.
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.
Track My Terminals Talk to the Team
Frey Commodities
"TradeLanes gives us control over the entire load order process, in real time. I highly recommended signing up to try their new early access product."