How to Automate MRI Intermodal Software

Leasing a box means trusting a yard you do not own

Boxes earn from the day they go on hire to the day they come back, and for most of that time they stand in a yard halfway around the world belonging to somebody else. MRI Intermodal Software keeps score: leasing, trading and depot management for container lessors, tank container operators, depots and trading companies.

It sits inside MRI Software now, having arrived when MRI acquired its former parent, Real Asset Management, in October 2017, on a product line going back more than thirty-five years. Anyone who knows the MRI name from property software is thinking of a different division; this is the container one.

The modules read like the business itself: Contracts, Billing, Inventory and Fleet Management, Equipment Sales, One Way Leasing, Maintenance and Repair. On the depot side, gate-in and gate-out are captured on a tablet with a digital EIR and photographs, the yard is mapped into slots, and repair estimates price off tariffs held per customer.

The depot's day arrives as gate moves and repair estimates

Hardly any of it originates with the lessor.

A lessor with boxes across a hundred depots is reading a hundred different sets of screens. Some yards send EDI. Some send a spreadsheet on Friday. Some publish a stock list on their own portal and expect you to come and look at it. A gate move that happened on Tuesday reaches your fleet record when somebody types it in, and until then the box is in the wrong place on your own map.

Then the repairs. An estimate arrives with damage codes and hours priced against a tariff, and somebody decides whether the box goes back into service, whether the lessee is charged, or whether it is worth fixing at all. The ones over the threshold need a signature. The ones under it need to not sit for three weeks waiting on the same person.

And the clock nobody is watching: an empty standing past its free days at a depot that charges storage. That one turns up at month end, for boxes nobody had any reason to look at.

MRI Intermodal Software

Stock lists that agree with your fleet Each depot's own inventory screen read overnight against your equipment record, so a box the yard is holding and the system says is on hire stops being an audit finding.

Estimates sorted before anyone opens them Repair quotes collected from depots and vendors and ranked against your approval threshold, with the damage photos already attached to the ones that need a decision.

Storage clocks counted while they run Empties sitting past their free time at a charging depot listed by what the storage will come to, rather than discovered on the invoice at month end.

Estimates price themselves off the customer's own tariff

MRI handles its own half thoroughly, and a lessor still running a fleet out of spreadsheets should say so plainly.

Contracts and Billing cover periodic billing, self-billing, invoice corrections and late-entry adjustments, which is most of what a lease book asks for. Maintenance and Repair generates estimates from preconfigured, customer-specific tariffs, so the same damage is not priced two ways. Gate operations capture activity in real time on mobile and tablet, with the EIR and the photos attached at the gate rather than typed up later. Yard management maps the ground into slots, and EDI integration runs to the ANSI ISO and UN EDIFACT standards.

That covers every depot already talking to you.

The ones that are not talking are where the money leaks. A third-party yard with a web portal and no feed is invisible until a person logs in. So is the repair vendor's own estimate page, the shipping line's screens, and the lessee's system that says the box came back last week.

A container fleet that raises its own dwell warnings

Take the fleet record and set it against whoever is physically holding the boxes tonight.

Every depot's own stock list read and compared with your inventory, so a container the system has on hire and the yard has standing empty surfaces as a line with a number on it. Gate moves lifted off the portals that send nothing electronic and written back against the equipment. Empties past their free time at a charging depot, listed by what the storage will come to.

The repair side follows the same shape. Estimates gathered from depots and vendors and sorted against your approval threshold, so the small ones move and the expensive ones reach a person with the photographs already attached. Reefers waiting on parts, named with how many days they have been down. Hire charges checked against what the contract says rather than what was keyed in when the deal was signed.

Money moves at the end of all this, so the split is clear. Reading depots, comparing and listing run unattended. An invoice, a repair approval or a note to a lessee is drafted and waits for the person who signs it.

The depot screens get read before the lease manager arrives

Approving repairs is the easy half. Collecting them off a dozen depot portals first is the hour nobody has.

WebRun is an AI agent that drives a real Chrome browser, signed in as your operations team. It opens MRI Intermodal, reads the fleet and the estimate queue, then opens the depot's portal, the vendor's page or the line's screens and compares what it finds there.

It runs on your schedule in a private environment of your own, and a workflow can be held to a named list of sites. You can watch a run while it happens and stop it part way.

Below, every workflow states the screens it touches and what it leaves unsigned.