Import Container Tracing
Inbound containers on scheduled watchlists across the Chicago ramps, with change-gated reports and the morning brief.
Customer story
Built inside a Chicago dispatch office.
Neo was designed around the daily work of SPARC's dispatch desk in Chicago: the railroads, steamship lines and chassis pools its dispatchers opened by hand every few hours, and the spreadsheets that carried the answers into the TMS. What follows is what that desk runs through Neo today.
- Company
- SPARC · Drayage and intermodal carrier
- Location
- Chicago, Illinois
The desk before
Eight portals, four rounds a day, one spreadsheet.
- 01
Six Class I railroad portals and a dozen steamship-line portals, each with its own login, its own date format and its own place to hide a hold.
- 02
The portal round done when there was time for it — and the ETA that moved at two in the morning seen at eight.
- 03
Chassis stock checked by refreshing a pool page until something appeared, then booked by hand before it vanished.
- 04
Customer delivery orders arriving as PDFs in a dozen layouts, re-keyed container by container.
- 05
No capture of what a portal said on the day a demurrage bill was disputed.
What runs every day
The modules on the desk.
Each one is a page in the dashboard and a route for the TMS, with its own audit trail. This is the set in daily use.
Export Booking Tracing
Outbound bookings watched for cutoff and ERD changes, with revisions surfaced as they happen.
Empty Return Check
Return locations checked in bulk across the steamship lines before an empty is dispatched.
Empty Return Check — Chassis
Where a pool chassis can go back today, by depot, with alerts when a depot changes what it takes.
Chassis Availability
Live pool stock across TRAC, CCM and DCLI, booked from the row that has it.
Chassis Reservation
Timed TRAC bookings that fire when the pool releases, CCM bookings on the dated grid, DCLI release requests by email.
Chassis Provider Lookup
Ownership, IEP and inspection for any chassis before it is pulled.
Rail Billing — Empty and Laden
Billing letters filed per container under the company identity, by portal or by email, with the Message-ID kept.
J1 Gate Records
Ingate and outgate receipts pulled from the ramps for disputes and per-diem questions.
Delivery Order Parsing
Customer delivery-order PDFs dropped on the form and returned as structured shipment data, per customer layout.
EDT / LDT Calculator
Departure windows back-calculated from the appointment, using measured yard and lane times. Experimental.
Fleet Mirrors
Motive geofences, drivers and vehicles mirrored nightly so waits and lanes are measured, not guessed.
What changed on the desk
The portal round became a brief.
The first portal round is a brief, not a chore
The morning brief lists what is at stake today — the boxes with free time running out, the bookings whose cutoff moved — before anyone has opened a portal.
A check that gets skipped no longer costs a box
Watchlists run on the Central clock whether the desk is busy or not, and email only when something moved. The quiet days stay quiet.
Chassis stock is booked, not chased
A timed booking fires the moment the pool releases stock and retries until it is booked; the dispatcher reads the receipt instead of refreshing the page.
Every number has a capture behind it
A disputed ETA or last free day traces back to the portal capture taken at the time, so the conversation with a railroad starts from evidence.
Any equipment number has one timeline
Paste a container, chassis or booking into Find and see every trace, gate receipt, return check and reservation about it, newest first — whoever ran it.
The shape of the deployment
Theirs, on their own VM.
- A single-tenant deployment on a VM the carrier controls, with its own database and its own backups.
- Portal credentials sealed in that database and unsealed only by a master key the deployment holds.
- Every outbound letter signed with the carrier's own company profile, in TEST mode until LIVE is switched on deliberately.
- Releases shipped as tags, migrations applied on start, rollback to the previous tag.
Get started
Give your dispatchers their day back.
A thirty-minute walkthrough on your own Chicago lanes and carriers. We will show a live trace on one of your ramps, a scheduled watchlist and the dashboard your team would open every morning.