Treat Cargo like Air Passengers to realise business synergies

The day has arrived. You have been dreaming about New Zealand for years, and now it is finally time to experience its beauty. Prior to crossing the Pacific, one has to make an international connection at San Francisco. Approaching the gate at your home airport, luggage in tow, you hit a massive crowd of travellers waiting for your flight and the next three flights leaving from the gate after yours.

This airline never does group boarding. All have the same priority. All are subject to standing in the same queue and as one looks at the long queue from the back every passenger has a unique problem. And this must be resolved before boarding. One person forgot to bring the required identification. The three member family behind her only possess two tickets.

The next traveller’s name is misspelled on his boarding pass. And so on, down the line. The fact that your ticket is correct and your papers are in order confers you no advantage whatsoever. It is not fair. It makes no sense. There can be ten different ways to improve the process, but none will give a helping hand in the current times. Now it is an hour past your scheduled departure time, with no resolution in sight. Will your New Zealand dream be deferred once again?

Essentially, this is a fact with Air Cargo Movement

Large Airport cargo terminal area sees up to 80 trucks arrive at random, in rapid succession, but the facilities could only process six to eight per hour. It is a serious mess. No truck has priority, and not only does this cause congestion, but also there is no incentive for the forwarder to produce correct paperwork, as trucks would end up waiting in the queue in any case. The root cause of this chaos is handling of customs compliance errors, incorrect paperwork and no advance information.

The Solution – Airport Cargo Community System

To limit congestion at the warehouse and treat air cargo like air passengers and have documents such as air waybills as electronic air waybill in the similar lines of an e-boarding pass. This will create a fast lane for pristine paperwork and prevents those bearing incorrect paperwork from causing delays and other inefficiencies. Yes, it serves as a holistic cargo handling system that enables generation of digital documents and exchange through digital means. Documents such as air waybills and manifests are churned out digitally i.e. electronic air waybill (e awb) and electronic manifest.

Read More to know about North America’s first Airport Cargo Community System.

It is designed and implemented like passenger-process, together with forwarders, transporters and handlers. Here the data flows between the cargo supply chain stakeholders (swapped as Passengers) airport operations personnel, and government agencies. And that is, modern data sharing in action. With the documentation procedures turning digital the interference of paper based transactions would eventually come down. Thanks to the new age cargo handling system and cargo community systems that are simplifying the trade significantly.

Like electronic air waybill, various other documents such as manifest, delivery order customs declaration etc would also be digitized. Therefore, treating cargo like passenger could be achieved seamlessly. Delivery Order for Airlines is as important as an electronic air waybill. The utility of Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) along with Optical Character Recognition and Robotic Process Automation has a major role to play in developing these documents (i.e., electronic air waybill, delivery order for airlines).