Missing port appointments and blowing my delivery schedule

[longtime2]

Seriously at my wit's end here. Our flow is totally broken because our drayage keeps missing their port appointments in Seattle. It’s a domino effect—miss the window, get rescheduled days out, then our warehouse unload crew is sitting idle. We're just a small importer; we can’t afford this chaos. How do the bigger players handle this? Is there a secret to finding a drayage company that actually respects an appointment time?

[flowers2]

That domino effect is the absolute worst, and it’s usually a sign of a carrier that's overbooked or doesn't have enough dedicated port focus. We solved it by moving to a provider whose entire model is built around port drayage services. The difference is night and day. Because this is all they do, they control their own schedule and equipment to hit those tight port windows reliably. Getting that first link in your supply chain to be solid changes everything downstream. The company we use, PNW Warehousing, treats the port move and the warehouse intake as one unified step. It saved our scheduling sanity. You can read about their approach here.