“The need for speed is on the ground”, and airlines need to facilitate communication across all parties during ground handling, especially for ecommerce shippers, delegates at this week’s Aviation Connect event in Istanbul heard.
As global supply chains shift towards a consumer-driven B2C industry, speed-and-efficiency trumps cost as the best way an airline can compete, according to Guillaume Halleux, CCO of handler Swissport.
“First, I want to rule out price, because a scenario like this is not about price. It’s about service; it’s about speed,” he said.
Mr Halleux explained: “We do it for live animals. We do it for pharmaceuticals. In the past five to 10 years, ecommerce has become a commodity and now the need for speed is on the ground.
“Every airline flies the same aircraft type, they all fly the same speed. So you win the battle on the ground,” he said. And the best way to do that is to facilitate communication across parties, he added.
And VP of cargo management portfolio at Champ CargoSystems, Shahzad Aslam, explained : “We want full traceability at every handover… at every milestone.
“When handovers happen, it should be quite transparent. We talk about ecommerce and this type of customer cannot wait, the market cannot wait. They need a solution for today.”
But one delegate said on the sidelines of the event, that each stakeholder “has their own way of doing things”, and standardising a platform for data communication “will never happen”.
“It would speed things up massively, but it will never happen… No one wants to be the first to change their system.
“Inefficiencies make profit. When things don’t work, there’s money to be made,” they added. And, especially when it pertains to constantly evolving ecommerce companies’ methods, airlines are hesitant to alter their systems.
Robert Fordree, SVP of cargo operations at Emirates SkyCargo, said: “What we need to understand better is what the ecommerce provider requires from us. I don’t think we have full transparency of that at the moment.
“The thought of trying to integrate our operating system into an ecommerce provider’s IT brings me out in a cold sweat. We’re struggling to do that with GHAs (ground handlers), let alone with an ecommerce provider whose technology is decades ahead of where we are,” he added.
And he noted that this was “one of the biggest challenges we have as an industry”.