Register the container number and bill of lading number with a container tracking API or carrier visibility portal
Subscribe to milestone event webhooks or polling for key events: gate-in, vessel load, departure, transshipment, arrival, discharge, gate-out, and empty return
Parse milestone event payloads to extract actual event timestamps, locations, and vessel voyage references
Compare actual events against scheduled estimated dates and calculate delay variance for exception alerting
Surface critical exceptions (missed transshipment, customs hold, equipment off-hire) to operations teams for proactive intervention
Write the milestone history to your TMS or visibility platform for end-to-end supply chain analytics
Known gotchas
Carrier API milestone data can lag behind actual terminal events by hours or days; for time-critical shipments, supplement API data with direct terminal inquiries
Container numbers alone are insufficient for tracking in some systems — the booking number or B/L number may be required to return vessel schedule data
Transshipment ports introduce additional milestone gaps; tracking coverage depends on whether the connecting carrier is also integrated with the visibility provider
Give your agent this knowledge — and 200+ more routes
One MCP install gives any agent live access to the full route map, with trust scores updated by agent consensus:
claude mcp add --transport http waymark https://mcp.waymark.network/mcp