Logistics - what is drayage?

I work for a company that has a department devoted to shipping our product overseas. Before this job I had no idea what went into moving from point A to point B - stick a stamp on it and be done. How wrong I was. Now my current project touches on their department and I’m trying to understand the terminology they are using. Most of it is pretty straight forward but one thing they refer to pretty often is a Dray Movement. We can’t figure out what this means and when we ask the team leader of our logistics department we don’t get a clear answer. So to make heads and tails of her explanation we turn to you. Does anybody here have experience in logistics? Can you explain what Drayage is and how it differs from just a basic truck movement?

I only know the term in the context of trade shows. The shipping people would deliver our booth and equipment to a loading dock. The drayage people would bring it to our assigned spot on the show floor, and after we got set up, they would take all of the crates and boxes away and store them somewhere. When the show was done, they would bring back all of the stuff from drayage, we’d pack it up, and they’d take care of getting it to the trucking company (or, since we had a pretty small business) to our rental van on the loading dock.

The Wikipedia article makes it pretty clear to me. Drayage is short, simple movements typically accomplished in a single work shift. Moving some stuff from a warehouse in a port-city to the warf would be an example.

I tried Wikipedia first but it didn’t clear up our understanding from the perspective of how they use it in our office. Though the short movement does give some perspective. I know they truck into the port cities, so it’s the dray movement that moves the product to the wharf? Do they also handle loading into containers?

It sounds like it is being used generically to describe any/all the minor stuff that has to happen at each end of the shipment…but excludes the long distance leg(s) in the middle. Because these take fairly different sorts of planning and arraigning, it makes some sense to break them out for separate consideration.

Kind of like “accessories” are to clothing, “the last mile” is to telecommunications, or “glue logic” is to computer design.

I’m not sure we can conclusively answer this. Every company tends to develop its own jargon, so this term may have meaning only in terms of your logistics team’s setup. Every company has its own kind of logistics, its own practices and custom ideas.

Wow… this throws me back. In the mid 90’s I was a developer on a large mainframe implementation for a shipping company. One of the apps I coded was tracking the movement of containers from the ship to a storage facility. So, if memory serves correctly, drayage is the move by truck of a container from the port (shipside) to a storage yard (nearby). The containers were then loaded onto trains for long distance transport or onto other trucks for medium distance transport. A drayman was the guy hauling the container from the ship (crane) to the storage yard. Another bit of trivia… the guys loading and unloading the actual cargo/containers on and off the ships are called stevedores.

Never thought I’d have any use for this knowledge. :cool:

I miss that job. If for no other reason than our offices were located in one of the office buildings at the actual dock in Oakland. Right in the middle of all the action. Very cool to see.

No love for the lumpers?

Forgot about you guys!

Yeah… tracked those costs as well, along with the in/out gate charges, lifts, storage, per mile dray costs… :slight_smile:

Shit, now I’m all wistful … LOL.

Thanks everybody for your answers - they’ve all been helpful. I think QuickSilver’s experience may be closest to how our department is using the term, just in reverse.

What we ship starts off in the interior of the country so we contract with trucking companies and rail to get it to our warehouses in our port cities. I think based on your responses and listening to some of our guys in our logistics department that the dray move is the final trucker who goes to a container yard to pick up a container, takes it to our warehouse to fill it, then drops it off at the port.

QuickSilver - sounds like you had a pretty cool office! Loading and unloading a container ship is so coreographed it looks like a dance. It’s amazing to watch.

Sure is. Those guys are efficient and quick as hell because ships sitting at port longer than necessary don’t make money.

Have they told you why shipping your containers on top vs. lower down is less expensive? :slight_smile:

They have not - what is the reason? I do know that we sell by the pound and that our product gains weight from the ocean humidity which we are very much in favor of!

I had learned this activity as shunting.

Is drayage at shifting the shipment when the shipping method changes and shunting only occurs at the warehouse?

When I first joined the project, they took us on a tour of the yard and docks and on board one of the container ships. The tour guide said the containers, once stacked are tied down to one another in case of rough seas. The highest tear, we were told, are not tied. If the voyage goes well, your cargo gets to the destination. In bad seas, even those big ships can get tossed around so instead of risking the entire ship, the top containers are sacrificial, meaning they sometimes end up going overboard, thereby making the ship less likely to get knocked over and sinking. So they charge less for those spots. Made me wonder if the insurance for that cargo is higher. I don’t recall asking the question.

Do you mean when a container being sent by train is changed to being sent by trucking company?

If I recall, that’s done at the short term storage yards. Containers either get routed to rail yards (which are often right near the port) or to truck hauling companies. Often, those guys come and get the containers from short term storage yards. Sometimes the dray companies will bring the containers to the haulers’ depots. Depends on the shipping brokers, etc. Hard to remember all the details anymore.

This raises a new question - who owns the container?

If we have 1 dray company in the US in Los Angeles that supplies us with a container and ships overseas I don’t think we ship an empty container back. I suspect it gets deposited in a container yard over there to be filled with whatever product another company there wants to use to send to wherever. At some point a container is no longer safe for travel and is disposed. I’ve even seen that some people are trying to reallocate them to build cheap homes! Now I’m really perplexed - what are the logistics of containers? Who buys them and who decides when they are used up?

To anyone who has ever exhibited at a tradeshow, especially those held in major U. S. cities (read: those in which unions are required), “Drayage” conjures up less-than-pleasant memories of very large bills.

Containers are owned or leased by various parties. A large shipping company will have their own containers and lease others because it’s not cost effective to have empty containers sitting around yards and paying storage costs. Often OOCL will lease a container to Maersk and vice-versa. But everybody knows where their containers are at any time because they are uniquely identified with their own numbers.

I don’t know who declares a container unfit for use. I would guess it would be the stevedores as they are the ones handling them more frequently than the rest. But I imagine the dray companies or the lumpers and splitters can declare a container no longer usable for shipping.

Yes…from what I hear from my friend you aren’t allowed to carry your own stuff inside from your vehicle, the union guys insist that they have to do it. Job security at its best.

Sorry but this is almost completely wrong although I suspect I can see the grains of reality that lie behind what you are saying.

The stacks carried on deck are certainly fastened. The corners of each container are held to the containers above and below by twistlocks. Up to the third tier - or sometimes higher if the vessel is fitted with a lashing bridge - the containers are also lashed using lashing bars to the corner fittings on the containers. It is correct that the top tiers on a high stack are only held by twistlocks but that should be sufficient if everything else is done right.

There is no sacrificial element. Losing any containers is a disaster, causing a great deal of disruption and cost, and potentially endangers the vessel through shifting of weight. Not to mention that the falling containers may well do damage on the way down, up to and including causing oil spills if they puncture ballast tanks. Modern ships have no need whatever to sacrifice containers to save themselves

Losing containers off the deck stacks does occur but not particularly often. There are some old statistics one often sees quoted suggesting containers are lost at a high rate but a recent study suggests that it’s actually relatively rare.

I am not aware of any lower rates charged for containers carried higher in the stacks. Generally a customer would have no knowledge of where their container was carried, which is an operational decision made by cargo planners entirely outside the sphere of sales and customers. Same for insurance rates.

Containers do not become unusable as a consequence of matters affecting safety about which stevedores would care. The structural parts of a container are the most robust. It is more usually the cargo-worthiness of a container that is the first thing to go: the seals around doors etc go, the sheet metal sides corrode through, that sort of thing. There are companies that do nothing but inspect containers to check whether they need to be withdrawn from service.