On an economic and political perspective, the African Air Cargo market has gained a lot of significance. For the year-till-date, it is the second fastest growing next only to North America. Its advantage is connecting the eastern and the western world and is expected to create 7 million jobs and USD 80 billion to spur economic growth in the continent. Countries such as South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya and Mauritius are key markets in this region. Most notably, Ethiopia is building Africa’s largest air cargo terminal to handle 600,000+ tones per year. Kenya is one of the emerging markets for logistics with its strategic placement connecting the western world and the eastern world. Also, it has a scope to dive deep into the African market. Lack of digitization in a fast transforming tech world, is a great challenge. Even though, developed and developing countries across the globe have fully digitized logistics operations, several countries in African region are yet to completely digitize their operations.
Siginon is an integrated end-to-end logistics and air cargo solutions provider based in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. Siginon has over 30 years of experience in the industry and provides supply chain solutions to their customers from the source to the final destination. They offer a plethora of services such as warehousing, customs clearance, ground handling as well as container freight operations.
When a shipment arrives at the destination, the ground handler is not able to update the collection agent or the trucker that the shipment has arrived. Therefore, it has to wait in the warehouse until the collection agent shows up. This is because there was a huge gap in information exchange. In short, there was no advanced shipment information.
Excessive manual intervention caused redundant information. As a result, ground handlers couldn’t process certain freights and the truckers had to take back the freight to the original warehouse. Also, a lot of time consumption that was of no use for the ground handler and other stakeholders involved in the process.
Inaccurate data and redundant information also led to leakage in revenue. There was always a confusion of the exact cost to be paid for each and every freight moving from the ground handler. This reflected on the balance sheet of ground handlers in due course of time.
In a labour intensive industry like logistics, paperwork becomes highly inevitable. In logistics industry, there are around 40 to 43 documents involved ranging from certificate of origin to airway bill to customs clearance etc. A ground handler was not receiving advanced information on arrival of the shipment/ freight. Therefore, the handler couldn’t predict incoming of a large freight container that would require excess manpower to handle.
To keep pace with the evolving needs of a rapidly expanding business, Siginon collaborated with Kale Logistics Solutions for adoption of GALAXY- a web-based Air Cargo Management System to automate its operations in Jomo Kenyatta International Airport (JKIA) in Nairobi, Kenya.
GALAXY is one of the most holistic cargo handling software covering comprehensive operations for import, export and transit. It incorporates several next-generation features like Mobile App, Customer Portal, Hand-held based app and EDI with Airlines.
With GALAXY, users can experience complete automation, clear visibility, control, collaboration and seamless integration within the stakeholder network. It is used at 80+ airports in Europe, Middle East, Africa, and India.
For Siginon, GALAXY addressed various pain areas such as lack of complete business visibility, multiple data entry problem, struggle to meet SLA with airlines, revenue leakage problems due to manual corrections uploading into SAP, a lot of paper movement, absence of proactive messaging to customers post departure, and financial integrations to the company ERP system amongst others.
Apart from this, Kale also facilitated free deposit account management for stakeholders involved in the operations. According to this facility, a forwarder can obtain credit for forwarding the freight further. Then the amount will be deducted on transaction level.
