GPS Fleet Tracking for Ports, Drayage & Intermodal

The argument with a terminal about turn times goes nowhere without numbers. High Point GPS sets a geofence at each terminal gate and another around the terminal grounds. Every tractor that crosses the outer line starts a clock, and the clock stops when it leaves. The result is a report of gate-in, gate-out and time inside for every move, by terminal, by day and by hour. When the operations manager brings a two-hour average at one terminal into a meeting, it is a record of hundreds of moves rather than a complaint. The same report shows which appointment windows move quickly and which ones bog down, and dispatch shifts the schedule accordingly.

Inside the terminal the driver is out of contact and often out of coverage. The GO device keeps recording position offline and uploads the trip when the tractor reaches the exit, so the dwell record is complete even where the signal was not. Dispatch sees the tractor come back onto the live map as it clears the gate, which is the moment the next pull can be assigned with confidence. Over a quarter, the turn-time data shows which terminals are worth the queue and which ones need a different appointment strategy.

A detention invoice is only as good as the time stamps behind it. When a tractor waits three hours at a customer's warehouse for an unload, the geofence around that dock records the arrival at 9:14 and the departure at 12:22, and the trip replay shows the tractor sitting in the same spot the whole time. High Point GPS attaches those records to the invoice, so the conversation with the customer starts from the platform's data rather than a note on a bill of lading. Customers who see the replay pay, and the ones who set up their own geofence reports stop disputing the pattern.

Demurrage runs the other way: the charge lands on the carrier or the shipper when a box stays at the terminal past free time. The container status board built from the trip data shows every box that has been pulled, every empty that has been returned and every one still out against its last free day. The operations desk gets the list before the deadline, not after the invoice. When a charge does come in, the return record with the gate geofence time shows whether it was earned, and a wrongly billed day is contested with the time stamp in hand.

A chassis has no engine and no power, and it spends most of its life unattended. Bluetooth asset tags read by any passing GO device report which tractor picked up which chassis and where it was left, and a battery-powered tracker on higher-value or owned chassis reports position on a schedule for months without a charge. When a chassis is on daily rental from a pool, the tracker shows the day it was picked up and the day it went back, which is the record that settles a pool invoice. When one goes missing from a customer yard, the last report says where to look.

The same approach reaches the box itself on moves where the carrier is responsible for it between the ramp and the customer. A tag on the container pairs it with the tractor and chassis that carried it, and the trip record shows the chain of custody from gate-out to delivery to empty return. That chain is what a shipper's claims department asks for when a seal is reported broken or a load arrives late, and it is ready in the platform rather than assembled from phone calls and terminal receipts after the fact.

Many drayage moves stay inside a short-haul radius, and some do not. The Geotab Drive app logs hours of service for the drivers and days that require an ELD, and the ruleset settings let a carrier apply the short-haul exemption where the operation qualifies while keeping full logs on the inland runs. Distance by jurisdiction for IFTA comes from the same GO device trip records for the tractors that cross a state or provincial line to reach an inland ramp. There is one device in the cab and one set of data behind the compliance reports, the turn-time reports and the detention evidence.

Dispatch works from the same map. The operations desk sees which tractors have cleared the terminal, which are at a customer dock and which are on the way back with an empty, and assigns the next appointment to the one that is actually free. Driver ID from the IOX-NFCREADERA ties each move to the driver, which matters when owner-operators share tractors. Engine-hours maintenance and fault codes reach the shop so a tractor in the queue with a charging problem is caught before it is stranded in the terminal with a box on the chassis and an appointment missed.