19 May How Artificial Intelligence can Enhance Air Cargo Performance?
The air cargo industry has now reached a stage where technology adoption is gradually becoming inevitable. According to a study, 1/3rd of the air freight industry worldwide has chosen to go digital since the pandemic outbreak. Of this, the majority have set a digital infrastructure during the pandemic and ensured business continuity. While business continuity happens to be the goal, technology intervention has perspective too that can enhance operational performance and think beyond.
As cargo volumes continue to rise, sometimes reaching up to million tonnes per year for logistics specialists, there is a critical need for fast and efficient processes and accurate real-time data. The industry is estimated to be losing vast sums of money due to under-reported volumes and mis-declarations of air cargo caused by the human error associated with manual processes.
Getting the data wrong results in incorrect storage charges, reduces loading efficiency and ultimately impacts profitability. To address these inefficiencies, air freight businesses need to blend their team’s expertise with real-time, data-driven intelligence. This can be derived by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Artificial Intelligence is a smart technology that has been making waves across industries. Be it the revolutionary ChatGPT or robots, AI is powering the world to the next stage of technological advancement.
Capacity & Demand Forecast
The major benefit of having an AI powered system is that it can offer predictive analytics and enable informed decision-making for businesses. Especially, understanding critical events like capacity and demand rise/slump is essential in the air cargo industry. Because during the pandemic, the industry suffered from struggling to thrive and a year later, they were struggling to manage humongous capacity driven by ecommerce shopping boom.
Cargo Load Factor Improvement
Ensuring cargo load factor is critical in air freight transportation as for long i.e., even before the pandemic partial belly capacity utilization was a major challenge for the industry. According to media reports, load factor for domestic air freight capacity in matured markets like North America were below 40 per cent and the service providers are failing to ensure full belly capacity utilization.
Transparency & Traceability
Despite its dynamic nature, the air cargo industry too suffers from lack of transparency. Stakeholders often complain dub an airport environment to be a blackhole wherein visibility of cargo movement is not known to the landside service providers. Due to this lack of transparency and traceability in the operations, there has been a rise in cargo theft within the air cargo complex. During the peak pandemic time, the vulnerability of cargo theft was much higher.
In a nutshell…
There is no doubt artificial intelligence is already transforming business functions and disrupting the traditional ways of business. Nevertheless, a 360-degree process mapping and bringing in all operations involved in a cargo complex in a single window platform like a cargo community system will further enhance and futureproofs growth prospects.