When everything moves as planned, nobody needs to be involved. The entire operational cost of a freight business sits in the shipments that do not, and in the phone calls asking about them.
typical demurrage cost per container per day
FreightAmigo, 2025
typical free time on imports before demurrage begins
FreightAmigo
increase in dwell times from congestion and disruption
FreightAmigo, 2025
the window in which an exception is cheap to fix, not days
Operational reality
These are the specific, measured problems in logistics and freight. Not generic digital transformation.
Free time on an import container is typically five to seven days, and demurrage runs from roughly a hundred to two hundred and fifty dollars per container per day once it starts. The difference between catching a problem on day four and day eight is entirely a matter of whether anyone was watching.
The single highest volume enquiry in freight is a status request. The information exists in the carrier feed, the TMS and the customs system. It is a lookup, but it lands on a coordinator who is in the middle of solving an actual problem.
Bills of lading, packing lists, commercial invoices, certificates of origin and customs declarations. They arrive as PDFs, scans and photographs, in dozens of layouts, and a single mismatched field between two of them stops a container at a border.
Status codes, milestone definitions and event timing differ per carrier, so a unified view of a shipment requires reconciling sources that genuinely disagree about what has happened and when.
Which customs broker to use for that lane, which carrier's ETA to distrust, what to do when a specific port throws a specific code. It is real expertise and it is almost entirely undocumented, which makes it a staffing risk.
Dwell times have risen roughly 20 percent through congestion and disruption, which compresses the window in which an exception can still be fixed cheaply. The same process that worked in a calmer market now produces charges.
A rate request requires checking lane rates, current surcharges, capacity and the customer's history. By the time a quote is produced the customer has often already accepted a faster one, and the faster one was not necessarily cheaper.
Watches carrier feeds against the plan, detects the divergence when it happens rather than when someone notices, and raises it with the recommended action and the cost of doing nothing attached.
Status enquiries resolved against the actual carrier feed and TMS, in the customer's language, with the honest answer when carriers disagree rather than a confident one picked at random.
Reads bills of lading, invoices, packing lists and declarations in whatever layout they arrive in, extracts the structured fields, and flags mismatches between documents before the container reaches a border rather than after.
Reconciles conflicting status codes and event definitions across carriers into one timeline, so a shipment has a single state rather than four competing ones.
The lane specific and port specific knowledge that currently lives with two people, captured, cited and searchable, so a new coordinator is useful in weeks rather than in a year.
Illustrative composites, drawn from how these workflows actually run in each industry. Not named client engagements.
A container discharges on a Friday. Free time is five days. The customs entry has not been filed because a commercial invoice value does not match the packing list.
Nobody notices until the broker chases on Wednesday. By the time the discrepancy is traced, corrected and refiled, free time has expired and demurrage is accruing daily on a container nobody can move.
The mismatch is caught at document ingestion, before discharge, because the invoice and packing list were cross checked the moment both arrived. The coordinator gets one notification naming the two documents, the specific field, both values, and the deadline that is at risk with the daily cost attached. The correction is requested from the shipper the same day, and the entry is filed inside free time.
A customer emails on Tuesday morning asking where three shipments are, two of which have conflicting carrier milestones.
A coordinator opens the TMS, checks each shipment, opens two carrier portals to reconcile the conflicting events, and writes a reply. Twenty minutes, repeated across a queue, by the person who should be solving the exception from the previous scenario.
The system answers from the live feed and the TMS, gives the current position and revised ETA for each shipment, and where carriers disagree it says so explicitly rather than picking one, flagging that shipment for a coordinator to confirm. The routine two resolve immediately. The genuinely uncertain one reaches a human with the conflict already laid out.
A 30 minute audit, no sales pitch. We map where automation can cut manual work and create measurable ROI across the tools you already use.