One of the most important areas where tech companies are starting to deliver value is through collaboration with other providers, says Yuval Baruch, CEO of Hermes Logistics Technologies
What have you been doing to improve air freight operational efficiency and communications, and what will you do this year?
As a technology provider, HLT’s focus in recent years was on digitalization. Although this is an abused buzzword by now, in HLT’s case it is directly linked to a set of efforts aimed at improving efficiency and communication.
Here’s what does that means in practical terms:
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Efforts to migrate customers over to Hermes SaaS have been gaining ground and we have been investing in preparations for and the completion of migrating customers to our NG cloud eco-system. This effort should contribute to our customers’ focus on running their business rather than running a server farm. This leads to better system performance at a lower cost and resource savings.
Next Generation BI and Datalakes
We have now completed our NG BI & Datalakes version 2 and have started rolling out our state-of-the-art Business Intelligence (BI) solution. The incredible modelling behind NG BI and the simple and friendly way that data turned into events can be analysed will enable our customers to have a better understanding of their business and better decision making that will lead to operational efficiencies
APIs and Collaborations
One of the most important areas where tech companies could deliver value is through collaboration. In the last few months, we have integrated Hermes 5 with a few solutions, CargoEye from SpeedCargo and Cargonizer from InventGroup to name a couple. In the last quarter of 2021, we have started an integration project for a comprehensive NG Landside Management solution powered by Nallian. These collaborations & API creation and expansion contribute massively to communication between various systems, to data sharing and lead to better performance of our customers but also their partners and the industry.
How can you and other stakeholders in the air freight supply chain work more effectively this year to improve visibility and streamline cargo operational processes – to minimise some of the congestion, delays and volatility experienced last year at certain cargo handling stations and airports?
HLT is a big advocate for best practice processes. One of the best ways an air cargo facility could leverage its processing abilities is by processing cargo in the most efficient way. We are working with our customers, looking at the way they use our technology through health-checks, as well as offering them best-practice process design as part of new implementations.
How can we better incentivise stakeholders in the air freight supply chain to support these aims?
At Hermes we believe that stakeholder buy-in into innovation is critical. Many of the industry players are unwilling to directly invest in innovation. To overcome this hurdle, HLT finds itself developing new solutions and introducing new tools through pilots where the risk to the customer is low and the potential benefit could be high. Once a new solution or service is tried and tested such that the customer sees the benefit, we will agree a roadmap for full deployment.
What role will new and emerging technology play?
New and emerging technology will play a massive role in any change and improvement the industry will experience. It is our belief that through collaboration between tech companies, sharing data, and leveraging data, we can finally benefit from real AI.
We have been involved in a project where we tried to train models for predictive purposes. The understanding that the data modelling was not at the level needed for these models to deliver true value led to the development of NG BI & Datalakes V2. Looking at the reporting capabilities of this solution is the first step towards the required modelling to enable true AI value.
