We are our own first customer
This was not built as a project and handed off. Our own freight business runs on it daily — quoting, tendering, tracking, invoicing, reconciliation. When something breaks, we are the ones who feel it first.
What switching actually saved
Lower freight cost
Same freight, same lanes, a third less per shipment — not from discounting, but from pricing every load across multiple carriers and validating the fields that trigger rebills before the quote goes out.
Fewer damages
One less transfer means one less round of handling. Stackability, linear feet and packaging go to the carrier before pickup, so loading is planned rather than improvised on the dock.
Measured results since go-live
Every piece exists because something cost us money
At first: quoting meant logging into portals
One portal per carrier, results copied into a spreadsheet, then into an email. Slow — and a typo went unnoticed.
→ wired API and EDI; one request, carriers priced in parallel
Then the rebills started
Wrong density, wrong NMFC, stackability never sent, linear feet over, residential not flagged — the carrier reprices and the gap is yours.
→ validate every field before tender, snapshot the quote as evidence
Half of support time went to "where is my freight"
Each question meant another portal login; PODs were hunted in email, and some turned out missing only at month end.
→ polling plus webhooks onto the timeline; BOL and POD retrieved automatically
And then: no idea which loads were losing money
Customer billing, vendor bills and agent splits lived apart; the picture only formed at month end, too late to trace.
→ AR and AP hang off one order, with accounting invariants checked hourly and alerted
What that means for you
The edge cases are already handled
Understated quotes from stackability, rebills from wrong NMFC codes, residential detection, ambiguous carrier status codes — these only surface when you run real freight. Each is handled in the system, not imagined from a spec.
Changes face a real regression net
Scheduled smoke tests, hourly accounting invariants, ghost-shipment reconciliation against carriers — because the money and customers at risk are ours.
Built to how Chinese-run logistics actually works
Bilingual UI, WeChat and WeCom notifications, agent distribution, China–US lanes and drayage customs — not localization patches, but part of the original grain.
308 Containers, One Solar Project: From the Port of Houston to a Texas Job Site
In March 2025, a China-listed manufacturer purchased a roughly 500,000-square-foot solar production facility in Dallas, Texas. Production equipment, assembly lines and precision instruments moved from China through the Port of Houston — including a large volume of oversized, specialized cargo.
How it was organized
- 308 containers landed at the Port of Houston in staggered batches across the shipping schedule, not all at once.
- Of those, 89 were oversized (OOG) loads on flat-rack containers — requiring separate equipment coordination from standard boxes at pickup and drayage.
- The other 219 were 40' high-cube SOC (shipper-owned) containers, tracked and returned on a different process than carrier-owned equipment.
- On arrival, containers went into temporary storage at a Houston warehouse rather than straight to the site — construction and installation at the facility were not yet ready to receive them.
- For delivery, 100 chassis were rented to match the volume of 308 containers — trucks left Houston in the morning and reached the Dallas site roughly 240 miles away by noon, on a same-day short-haul rhythm.
- Delivery to the job site was staged against actual installation progress rather than first-in, first-out — running at roughly 5-8 truckloads a day, paced to what the project needed.
- Once emptied, SOC containers were returned to a Dallas-area SOC container yard — no backhaul to the Houston port required.
- All 308 containers rolled up under a single project view, each independently tracked and documented, with overall progress visible at a glance.
19 Overweight Containers, 38 Transformers: Intermodal Rail to a Memphis Job Site
In May 2026, a shipment of transformers moved into the U.S. via intermodal rail on the Dallas–Memphis corridor, with final delivery to a project site in Memphis. 19 40-foot high-cube containers, each carrying two transformers, moved as overweight cargo. ShipMay handled the origin drayage, coordinated the intermodal move through to Memphis, and arranged a specialized crew on site to receive and unload the overweight containers.
How it was organized
- The shipment moved by intermodal rail — rail for the long haul with drayage on both ends — covering the Dallas–Memphis corridor without a full over-the-road move.
- 19 40HQ containers each carried two transformers as overweight cargo; ShipMay handled the origin drayage.
- The intermodal move was coordinated straight through to the Memphis destination, without a mid-route split or transfer.
- On arrival at the Memphis site, a specialized crew was coordinated to receive and unload the overweight containers — this class of cargo needs dedicated equipment and labor, not a standard receiving process.
- From origin to completed unloading at the site, the whole move took about a week.
Your situation is probably in there
None of this was designed up front — each piece cost us money first.
