Free days that ran out
in someone else’s yard.

Detention is not an accident of container work — it is the largest single variable in it. Meridian was paying it every month and could not say, box by box, who had caused it.

Fleet · 38 trailersLanes · Chennai port ↔ ICDBoxes · ~1,100 per monthOn QB-FMS · 2 quarters

6.1 → 2.3Days a box sits
before it returns

₹19.4LDetention recharged,
not absorbed

92%Of detention now
attributable to a party

4Customer contracts
renegotiated on it

Before

A clock nobody was holding.

The free-day count on a box starts at the line’s gate-out and ends when it comes back empty. In between it passes through a CFS, a customer’s factory, a night halt and a return slot — four handovers, each recorded, if at all, in a WhatsApp group.

The detention invoice from the shipping line arrived three to six weeks later, as a lump sum against a list of container numbers. By then nobody could reconstruct which box had waited where, or on whose instruction. It was cheaper to pay it than to argue it, so Meridian paid it — every month, as a cost of doing business.

After

Every box carries its own clock.

The container number is the trip. Gate-out, arrival, unstuff start, release and return are five timestamps on one record, each one stamped by the driver from the gate he is standing at. The free-day countdown sits on the trip and turns from bone to volt when it has two days left.

When the line’s invoice arrives, it reconciles against a movement history rather than a memory. Detention that belongs to a customer is now recharged in the same week it occurs, with the timestamps attached — which has proved to be the part customers argue with least.

“A box standing still is not idle. It is billing somebody. Until last year it was billing us, and we found out six weeks after it stopped mattering.”

Director · Meridian Container Lines

What actually moved the needle

Three changes, in the order they mattered.

The gate stamp

One tap at each gate, geofenced so it cannot be entered from the yard the next morning. Nothing else on the trip changed. It is the timestamp that makes every other number in this case study arguable in a customer’s office.

The countdown on the dispatch board

Free days remaining, per box, in the same view the dispatcher already used to allocate trailers. Boxes stopped being returned in the order they were remembered and started being returned in the order they were expiring.

Empty running, priced per box

The return leg had never carried a cost of its own. Once it did, two lanes that had looked profitable on the loaded leg turned out not to be, and were repriced rather than dropped.

How QuamBase handles container & ICD haulage →

What detention does to a corridor: unit economics per trip →

Your fleet, your numbers