SwitchingMigration
Switching drayage TMS: what moves, and what you re-key
A drayage TMS migration is not a button. It is a list of records, and every one of them either carries across from your export or gets typed again by a person. This page is that list, written before you sign anything rather than discovered in week two.
Record by record
Rows marked Planned have nothing to import into. For rates, invoices and integrations there is no table at all; for documents there is a table and no file store connected behind it. The rows above them describe fields that exist in the system today. What the containers and their clocks look like once loaded is on the containers page, and the board they land on is on the dispatcher board page.
The sequenceDone together
How a migration runs today
Five steps, none of them automated. The reason it reads like a working session is that it is one — the product has no data-entry screens yet, so loading a carrier is our job rather than a task we hand to your dispatchers on a Friday.
- The export
- Whatever your current system will give you: customers, locations, equipment, drivers, open loads. CSV is fine. So is a screen that will not export and has to be read off a screenshot — that happens more often than vendors admit.
- The read
- We go through the columns with you and map them to fields. This is where the duplicates, the dead equipment and the customer that is really three customers come out, and it is worth doing slowly.
- The load
- We put the data in. The board reads today — it does not write — so there is no screen in the product where your team could do this even if you wanted them to.
- Parallel running
- Both systems carry the same days. Your old TMS stays the book of record for billing until you say otherwise, because the financial loop in DrayBase is not built yet.
- The cut
- Shift by shift, not all at once. A dispatcher who has run a full week of their own moves on the new board is the only signal worth cutting over on.
That is the design, not a track record. No outside carrier has been migrated onto DrayBase — the first one is the NY / NJ operation this product is built alongside, and it has not moved yet either. What lands next is on the roadmap.
TermsWhat we will not say
Three things you will not get from us
The mockup this page was drawn from put a fourteen-day timeline on the migration. That number came out of a designer rather than out of a migration, so it never made it onto the site. You will get named steps, and a date only once we have run one end to end for a carrier that is not us.
There is no trial, no paid proof of concept and no conditions to sign, because there is no billing in the product to attach them to. What early access looks like is a conversation, not a contract.
The commitment is that what you load stays yours and leaves with you if you go. Export tooling is on the list rather than in the product, so today that commitment is a promise and we are labelling it as one. Planned
The migration you should fear is the one nobody itemised.
QuestionsStraight answers
What carriers ask before they move
Can you import from PortPro or another drayage TMS?
Not automatically. There is no importer in the product, and no two exports out of this market come in the same shape. What happens today is that we read your export with you and load it ourselves. An importer is planned; it is not what the first carriers will get, and pretending otherwise would only move the typing to a worse moment.
Do we have to stop using our current system on day one?
No, and you should not. The design is that your old TMS stays the book of record for billing while dispatch runs the same days on both, and you cut over shift by shift rather than over a weekend. Nobody has done that with DrayBase yet, so treat it as the plan, not as a track record.
Who does the typing?
We do the bulk of it, from whatever your system will export. Two things are faster in your hands than in ours: your negotiated rates, because they live in contracts rather than in your TMS, and the containers open on the day you switch, because those are worth a fresh look at the terminal anyway.
How long does it take?
We do not know, and anyone quoting you a number for your operation before seeing your data is guessing. The design this page was drawn from carried a fourteen-day migration timeline. Nobody had ever run a migration to measure, so it never shipped. You will get a plan with named steps and no calendar until we have run one end to end.
What if our data is a mess?
Then the migration is where you find that out, which is the underrated part of switching. Three spellings of the same warehouse, chassis that left the fleet two years ago, customers nobody has billed since 2023. We would rather that surface on a call with you than quietly become your problem inside a new system.
Is our data kept separate from other carriers?
Every operating row carries the company it belongs to, and Postgres enforces it on the connection rather than trusting the application to remember a filter. A forgotten condition returns nothing instead of returning your neighbour's day.
How the tenant isolation behind that last answer actually works is written up on the security page. What a seat costs once there is a price is on pricing, where the numbers are still marked as undecided.
Early access
Bring the export, we will read it
Send whatever your current system gives you and we will go through it on a call: which records would carry, which ones your people would re-key, and whether DrayBase is worth the disruption for your operation yet. If the answer is no, that is the answer you get.
Access opens one port at a time — Newark, Elizabeth, Port Liberty NY first — precisely so migrations get done properly instead of in parallel with four others.