Demurrage is a data problem

Demurrage and detention feel like operational failures, but they're usually information failures. The free-day clock started, it ran, and by the time anyone looked, the window had closed. No single person decided to pay a penalty — the data just wasn't in front of them in time.

A clock per container

Freightflow runs a free-day clock for every container, starting from gate-in and using the right free days — from the assignment override, the voyage, the shipping line, or the customer default, in that order. As detention approaches, alerts fire and escalate through your rules, on a cadence measured in minutes, not end-of-day reports.

You can't manage a deadline you can't see. Make it visible early enough, and demurrage becomes a decision instead of a surprise.

The point isn't to add more alerts to an already noisy day. It's to surface the few that carry money, early, to the person who can act — and to keep the clock running whether or not anyone remembered to check it.

Alerts that respect the desk

The failure mode of most alerting is noise: so many notifications that people learn to ignore all of them. A clock that cries wolf is worse than no clock. So the useful version fires early enough to act, escalates only when it isn't handled, and routes to the person who can actually do something about it — not the whole team, and not a dashboard nobody has open.

Get that right and the tone of the operation changes. Demurrage stops being a monthly line item you explain after the fact and becomes a small, boring series of decisions made on time. The savings are real, but the bigger win is that the deadline stops being a source of dread.