Dispatch only when it is safe.

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 If the appointment is no longer valid, you get the alternative before the truck moves.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.