Agility and flexibility are key to 2022 and further recovery, says David Linford, director for global sales and account management at CHAMP
While the pandemic is still a part of our lives, the vaccine roll-out offered a significant boost to air cargo – both in business and its effects on the wider global economy. 2022 will remain a challenging year due to the uncertainties the emergence of the Omicron variant brought on and other variants may bring in future. But there is also cautious optimism with some countries starting to relax travel restrictions and self-isolation rules, hopefully helping to increase passenger travel and the much-needed belly capacity to meet the demand on key routes.
Like the rest of the world, aviation and air cargo will need to adapt to co-existing with COVID. To accomplish this, agility and flexibility will be key – as will be data and business intelligence. Bottlenecks – whether caused by storage capacity or lack of trained workforce – cannot be fully prevented but minimalized with the right processes, technology and business insights.
Openness, innovation and collaboration
In the past year, CHAMP has adopted the mantra of ‘Open. Innovative. Collaborative.’ It is our new engagement model in reaching out to all our customers and partners in the supply chain to achieve greater things together.
One example is our partnership with Air Cargo Belgium to support an innovation platform for the Belgian Air Cargo Community. There, industry stakeholders can pool their ideas and share resources to better improve and increase efficiencies across the market and benefit one of our communities, with hopes for more to come.
APIs and portals will continue to drive efficiencies. In times of staff shortage and where demand outstrips supply, self-service booking portals on carriers’ websites – which are connected to their Cargo Management Applications – help streamline the sales process and maximise capacity.
Visibility remains a firm way forward for air cargo in 2022. Through Traxon Premium Tracking and other tracking API services, shippers and forwarders can benefit from automatic real-time alerts regarding the progress of their shipments and address any issues quickly and efficiently.
We have also seen major adoption of our mobile handling application Cargospot Mobile, providing greater flexibility on hardware devices and providing much more functionality and efficiencies to the warehouse operations. We expect this to further accelerate in 2022, revolutionising the handling world.
Market insights service
MarketAnalytics is CHAMP’s new market insights service and provides daily market data – supporting the agility required in 2022. MarketAnalytics brings new insights updated daily through easy to interpret Power BI dashboards.
We have seen many countries delay the introduction of advance customs filing, but we expect more countries to launch their programmes in 2022. Brazil may be the first as it gears up to require advance cargo information from Q2. CHAMP’s Traxon Global Customs application already provides customs reporting to more than 60 countries and will be ready for Brazil to ensure shipments won’t be delayed.
Continuing innovation
In 2021, we led an all-out effort to explore machine learning for our product portfolio. For 2022, we look forward to collaborating with the industry to select the best potential use cases for experimentation. Finally, we continue to explore the potential of voice recognition technologies to enable new ways of interacting with our products.
CHAMP is also involved in Internet of Things (IoT) technologies that enable us to centralise and monitor in real-time cargo data available for pharma shipments, such as from temperature sensors. We also conducted extensive research in employing artificial intelligence to extract the content of documents to enable their digitalisation into our community.
All in all, we believe 2022 will be another major transitioning year out of the pandemic – better than 2021, but still fragile. Technological progress and further digitalisation have given agility and boosts in efficiency for many to make it through the worst of this crisis. We expect demand for such cargo technologies to further increase throughout this year.
