Air cargo still relies heavily on paper documentation for the exchange of shipment information. Each international airfreight shipment can require more than 30 different paper documents – increasing the cost of airfreight and lengthening transport times.
e-Freight is an IATA initiative aimed at removing paper documents from the supply chain and replacing the same with digital information exchange. It is an initiative developed with regional stakeholder representatives to eliminate paper Air Waybill (AWB) and replace it with electronic data interchange (EDI) message formats.
An e-AWB (Electronic Air Waybill) significantly simplifies the air-freight supply chain movement by removing paper air waybill.
Our client is a leading logistics service provider in Europe that organizes and coordinates transport operations, through the application of international commerce laws.
They also have wide presence in Asia Pacific region other than their wide spread presence in the European market.
To reduce the heavy cost involved in documentation as well as to digitally
streamline the documentation process. Therefore, the initial step was to remove paper air waybill and enable seamless document exchange movement online.
Kale offered PING, which is an innovative service to digitize the issuance of Air Waybill and comply with IATA’s e-Fright initiative. PING’s interface is a combination of Machine Learning (ML) and Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
PING enables agents can directly submit information to airlines for Master Air Waybill (MAWB) and House Air Waybill (HAWB) in conformance to the requirements.
Forwarders or truckers can send .pdf copies or emails of the air waybill details to the PING portal. PNG’s Document to EDI Converter Service extracts data from documents like commercial invoices, packing list, Air Waybill, and converts the same into EDI messages, which are auto-transmitted to airlines, and other entities in the supply chain.
As the process was completely automated, it avoided any paper exchange or physical visits to the Airline office.
“With Kale Logistics Solutions, we found a lot of benefits and through this we could do a lot of improvements to our internal processes. All our internal processes are now easy because of Kale Logistics. We just have to send a PDF copy of the e- Air Waybill to Kale Logistics who then transmit it as an EDI message to the airlines. Also, we avoid some of the costs spent on manual document generation and that savings is very essential for our company. Another important point is the customer service. With the PING team, Kale Logistics provides very good customer service. They are fast, efficient and every time you have a problem you can just send them an email. In few minutes, they will respond to you.”
