An inland container depot is a customs station with a yard attached, a thousand kilometres from the sea. STOS is the inland container depot management system that reconciles the bonded arrival, runs the inland clearance and yard, consolidates up-country exports, and reports every movement to customs and the lines.
Software written for a berth assumes the vessel sets the clock. At a dry port in Lahore, Faisalabad or Multan the vessel is a week away and something else drives the yard entirely. Three differences change the whole design.
Your inbound event is a bonded inland movement from Karachi or Port Qasim, and it has to be reconciled against what actually left the coast. STOS records bonded movements the way customs expects them, with the bonded carrier, seal number and destination captured and reported, and the gate-in at your end registering against the IGM and index the box was created under.
The Goods Declaration is filed, examined and released inland, which means clearance status, holds and examination outcomes drive your yard plan directly. GD hold, ANF status and paper ready are operational screens at a dry port, not paperwork someone else deals with at the coast.
The shipping line's empty pool is at the coast. Every box you strip inland has to be tracked, held and repositioned back down, ideally under an export booking rather than empty. STOS covers empty container tracking and repositioning, empty receiving and empty gate-out with its own gate pass.
The inland import leg is longer, slower and involves more parties than a coastal move. Every handover in it is a place where the record can drift, so STOS keeps one record all the way through.
Before anything moves, the depot knows what is coming. Upcoming containers gives visibility of expected arrivals so labour and equipment can be planned, and Pre Alert Management covers pre-arrival notification for cargo, whether the boxes are coming up by rail rake or by bonded road haulage.
The box arrives at the ICD and is registered at the gate with OCR and RFID identification, against the container and index records already created. The arrival is reconciled against the bonded movement and reported to customs.
The container is placed and the yard position recorded. Yard areas are defined by cargo type in advance, and grounding status, container location and return to yard keep the supervisor honest about where things actually are.
Examination is carried out on your ground with digital inspection and examination workflows, handling codes and examination charges attaching to the consignment. Clearance status becomes visible to everyone working the box rather than living in one officer's file.
LCL consignments are de-stuffed with a tally sheet and indexed as grounded cargo, then weighed and receipted. Full container loads skip that entirely and go out as one box. Break bulk runs the same receiving, grounding and delivery lifecycle.
The delivery order authorises release and the invoice is raised against the customer's tariff: inland storage, handling and the service charges specific to your facility, with sales tax and, where the customer settles in foreign currency, multi-currency billing.
The gate pass is issued and the cargo leaves for the consignee's factory, minutes away instead of a day and a half down the motorway. The gate-out is reported to customs and the movement closes.
The emptied container is gated out to the yard under its own gate pass and a CODECO message goes to the line. From there it is tracked and repositioned, ideally straight into an outbound export booking from the same catchment.
The strongest argument for a dry port is that the cargo is made next door. Textiles around Faisalabad and Lahore, sports and surgical goods around Sialkot, rice and general cargo across Punjab: stuffing it inland and railing a sealed box to the coast beats trucking loose cargo a thousand kilometres.
Inland operators rarely run a single site. The hard part is not the second yard, it is seeing both of them the same way on a Monday morning.
Device-agnostic access with unlimited users, so a Faisalabad yard supervisor and a Karachi head office see the same live record.
Unlimited roles and granular permissions mean each location's staff get exactly their screens, with an audit trail behind them.
Customisable reports and KPI monitoring on gate events, truck movements and inventory, exported as XML, CSV or PDF with access control per role.
Deploy centrally in the cloud or on-premises at each site, whichever suits the connectivity you actually have inland.
A dry port's invoice looks different from a coastal one. Alongside storage and handling there are the service charges that come with being the customs station, and customers who settle in more than one currency. STOS handles that with flexible tariff and rate management, configurable tariff heads and charges, agent tariff, storage tariff, port charges, sales tax and exchange rate, plus multi-currency billing and invoicing.
Because all billable operations are captured from the movements themselves, the invoice is a consequence of the work rather than a reconstruction of it. The financial module integrates with the accounting system you already run, and the accountant keeps vouchers, receivables, payables, chart of account, ledgers and year closure in the same place.
On the messaging side, an inland depot has more parties to keep informed, not fewer. STOS exchanges EDI with Pakistan Customs, PCS PSW, Maersk, Hapag Lloyd, CODECO and weighbridge systems, with a status panel per partner, retry queues for failures and a message log to check before anyone resends.
Dry port management software is a terminal operating system for an inland container depot, a facility that receives sea containers moved inland under customs bond and clears them at an inland customs station instead of at the coast. It has to reconcile the arriving in-bond movement, run gate-in, grounding, inland examination and delivery, handle export stuffing for the surrounding industrial catchment, and report every movement by EDI. STOS by Ciphertronix covers that end to end.
Three things change. First, the container arrives against a bonded inland movement rather than straight off a berth, so the arrival has to be reconciled against what left the seaport. Second, customs clearance and examination happen at the inland station, so the Goods Declaration, holds and clearance status drive your yard, not the vessel schedule. Third, the shipping line's empty pool is back at the coast, so every empty released inland has to find its way home. A dry port management system has to be built around those three facts.
Yes. STOS is deployed cloud-based or on-premises with device-agnostic access and unlimited users and roles, so an inland container depot in Lahore, Faisalabad, Multan, Sialkot, Quetta or Peshawar runs the same platform as a coastal facility, with its own yard layout, its own tariff and its own gate hardware. Analytics and reporting roll up so head office sees every site without asking each one for a spreadsheet.
Yes. The Export module runs the full inland consolidation flow: a loading program for the vessel, voyage, port and commodity; entering cargo and cargo received as exporters deliver; grounded cargo in the yard; create container and GD association so the system knows which Goods Declaration went into which box; then stuffing and service completion reported to customs, the export invoice, the delivery order and gate pass, and a dray off report over the completed movements. Customer NOC, GD hold, cargo roll over and customer credit are handled alongside it.
With advance visibility rather than a phone call from the gate. STOS gives an inland depot an upcoming containers view of what is expected to arrive so resources can be planned ahead, and Pre Alert Management covers pre-arrival notification for cargo and vessels. Yard areas are defined per cargo type before live tracking is enabled, so an arriving batch has somewhere to go rather than being grounded wherever there is a gap.
An ICD typically bills inland storage and handling, plus service charges that a coastal facility never raises. STOS handles this through flexible tariff and rate management with configurable tariff heads, storage tariff, agent tariff, port charges, sales tax and exchange rate, and multi-currency billing and invoicing. All billable operations are captured from the movements themselves, and the module integrates with the accounting system already in place.
Bonded terminals just outside the Karachi and Port Qasim perimeter, taking the de-stuffing, examination and storage load off the quay.
Off-dock softwareDepots holding empty boxes for shipping lines, where the EIR, the condition record and the stock report are the entire product.
Depot softwareCargo, gate, shed and examinations, financial and analytics modules, plus BRT, cross stuffing and pre alert management.
Explore STOSStill comparing platforms? Read Best TOS 2026 for how terminal operating systems differ on customs messaging, billing and deployment.
From the bonded arrival to the export box heading back down to the coast, with customs and the lines told at every step.