What shippers really want: Airfreight’s true customers speak out

What change looks like

There’s some debate as to what steps the air cargo supply chain must take to align its standards with the industries it serves. “We all fall into the trap of treating technology as a savior,” said Fried, who reiterated that this didn’t negate that “shippers are entitled to in-transit visibility.”

Technology providers are eager to peddle their wares to the industry, and many of these solutions are promising. But even the most advanced products require a component of old-fashioned interpersonal cooperation – another dynamic that the CAS is eager to promote. A lot of time is spent waiting on shipments, but it can be just as costly if it arrives too early.

Despite its promise, electronic air waybills (e-AWBs) have failed to meet the adoption goals IATA has set for the air cargo industry. That is, in part because, despite being ‘digital,’ the format is not ‘digitized,’ meaning that it’s still just a digital document, and one that’s expensive to implement. That’s not to say that e-AWB couldn’t be integrated into a larger platform, but progress is slow, and the industry needs to move faster.

One technological development that’s garnering attention, and already being tested in airfreight, is blockchain technology – a type of decentralized ledger of previous electronics transactions that are recorded automatically and can never be changed or hacked into. According to The Economist, blockchain “lets people who have no particular confidence in each other collaborate without having to go through a neutral central authority. Simply put, it is a machine for creating trust.”

In airfreight, blockchain is a mechanism that allows forwarders and carriers, for example, to reliably share only the data they want, and only with authorized parties that have the keys to access the data. Because it is encrypted, blockchain technology is as secure (or more) as any other electronic communication currently in use.

“The best thing would be to have an open-source system,” Scholte said. For global companies that navigate airports on multiple continents, advanced technology is useful only insofar as it is compatible with the software that everyone else is using.

The underwhelming adoption rates for e-AWB suggest that there won’t ever be one industry standard. Ericsson responded with a solution that responds to “how the world looks like today,” according to Mellin. “Think about it like a library – you know the title of the book and the author, then you just need to know what library and what shelf, and then you can find it. The internet gives us this ability.”

Considering the constraints of extant legacy systems, integration technology, data sharing, privacy rules, data storing regulations, numerous information standards across multi-mode transports, and business rules, the team at Ericsson decided to “find a solution using what we have today, yet opening a path to the future.”

Hasse Römer, lead engagement for new industries, logistics CGIS industry and society at Ericsson, is working on a uniform resource identifier that looks at three simple components. The identifier, known as a “global unique identifier,” or GUI, is stored online in the logistics backbone.

The proposed solution consists of three parts: 1) the logistics object identifier from a company; 2) the company issuing the identifier; and 3) the uniform resource identifiers that point where more details regarding the logistics object identifier can be reached.

From there, authorized parties can use standard internet protocols such as ReST – “representational state transfer” – to identify the company that issued the shipment, and request and update information about the logistics object.

Römer saw this as a way to account for multiple standards, “as well as different levels within the logistics hierarchy – be it an airplane, a container, a pallet, or a box on the pallet.”

With the right access codes, this allows for complete visibility and accountability at the cost of a mobile device.

People still matter

On the human side of the equation, shippers and the logistics companies they work with agree that industry cooperation will go a long way in improving supply chains. But in this regard, shippers argue, airfreight companies need to do a better job of networking with other modes of transportation. Glyn Hughes, IATA’s global head of cargo, said that if the maritime, rail, road and aviation transport industries want to serve their respective customers, “to the absolute optimum level of service, then we have to recognize that there are almost no commodities that are going to have a single mode of transport.”

The Trade and Cargo Facilitation Association is an incipient organization that addresses this intermodal communication breakdown, bringing stakeholders together to address issues, such as low yields and ICT adoption rates. Another promising multimodal EU managed forum is the Digital Transportation and Logistics Forum.

However, air-cargo industry presence is currently low in these associations. Perhaps it’s time to change that?

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