Shipment monitoring: we tell you when a shipment stops moving

Quality checks answer “does the paperwork add up?”. Monitoring answers a different question: “has this shipment stopped moving?”

Every day Trackberry runs a sweep of your active shipments, looking for problems that are easy to miss: a carrier that stopped publishing, an ETA that came and went, a container sitting at the terminal, a draft nobody validated. Each problem becomes an alert.

Where alerts appear

• The Health column on the shipments list. Every row has a dot showing the worse of its quality checks and its monitoring alerts, with a dashed ring when monitoring has raised an alert. Hover over it for the full breakdown: monitoring alerts come first, with critical ones at the top. It replaces the old Checks column.
• A “Needs attention” tab next to Active and Archived, with an amber count badge, filtering the list to just those shipments. It’s hidden entirely when nothing needs attention.
• Banners on the shipment page, amber or red, each saying how long the problem has been going on and what to look at.
• A “Shipment stalled” notification, one per shipment, listing everything wrong with it instead of sending one message per problem.

What it watches for

Tracking — tracking has gone dark · no carrier update · carrier never reported · reference not recognised Schedule — past its ETA · ETA has slipped · sitting at the terminal with no gate-out Workflow — waiting for approval · draft never validated · failing checks left unresolved

Thresholds are tuned per mode, so an ocean shipment can go much longer without news than an air shipment before it raises an alert. A “no carrier update” alert also stays a warning, and does not escalate, while the vessel’s AIS position is still moving. A moving vessel shows the voyage is going ahead.

The terminal-dwell alert is the one most likely to save you money. A container that has been discharged but not collected is using up its free time, and once that runs out it is accruing demurrage at a daily rate that escalates. Finding out on day two, instead of when the invoice arrives, is where the saving comes from.

Alerts look after themselves. One notification when a problem opens, another if it turns critical, one reminder if it’s still open a week later. As soon as the sweep stops detecting it (the carrier published, the draft was validated, the container gated out), the alert closes itself. There’s nothing to dismiss and no acknowledge button: fix the underlying problem, or let the shipment move on.

Monitoring only ever reads and reports. It changes no data, makes no carrier calls of its own, and costs nothing. The full list of what it watches is in Shipment Monitoring.

FAQ #

How is monitoring different from quality checks? #

Quality checks read the documents on a shipment and tell you whether they agree with each other. Monitoring ignores the documents and watches the shipment’s progress instead. A shipment can pass every check and still be stuck.

Do I have to dismiss an alert once I’ve dealt with it? #

No. The daily sweep recalculates every alert, so an alert closes itself the moment its cause is gone. There is deliberately no acknowledge button — acknowledging a problem is not the same as fixing it.

Does monitoring cost anything or use up tracking credits? #

No. It only reads data Trackberry already has and makes no calls to any carrier or tracking provider.