Are we ready for e-freight?
Paperless planes … it’s an exciting prospect, and the news that New Zealand could adopt IATA’s e-freight paperless air freighting by as early as this year has been widely welcomed.
 Inevitably though, the swift implementation of the new process means all areas of our business need to be preparing now to embrace the changes and dig in for the inevitable teething stage. “Are we ready for this?” some
may ask.
The answer is “yes”. The selection process is rigorous and the fact that New Zealand is among those selected for implementation in 2008/9 is a tribute to the tremendous efforts of both IATA and the industry here. IATA is working tirelessly to provide wide-reaching support to member airlines internationally to promote the widespread adoption of e-freight – including sending experts to visit Pacific Islands airlines free of charge to provide advice and training on e-ticketing.
But countries are certainly not being rushed before they are ready – IATA estimates that fewer than 25 percent of locations worldwide will be e-freight capable by 2010.
Before declaring a country e-freight ready, IATA requires that business, technical and legal frameworks are all in place to allow airlines, freight forwarders, customs administrations and governments to seamlessly exchange electronic information and e-documents instead of paper.
Air New Zealand’s decision to replacing its cargo management system with a multimillion-dollar ‘next generation’ system to handle booking, pricing, billing and tracking domestic and international air freight will have been a major factor in paving the way for our early adoption for e-freight.
Air New Zealand was only the third carrier to buy the iCargo system, developed by Indian company IBS. It will allow airline customers to track individual shipments over the web and has been built to support the use of RFID chips or GPS transceivers to tag shipments.
Participating airlines, freight forwarders, shippers and customs organisations will now work together to create local implementation teams. Their efforts will be supported and guided
by IATA standards, e-freight operating processes and one-time data entry.
Now it’s up to us as an industry to add an element of compulsion to this initiative so the benefits can be reaped by all. This could just be the beginning of the information superhighway that’s been touted for our industry for years.
New Zealand needs to improve sustainability in the supply chain, enhance efficiency, reliability and speed, and create productivity without adding cost. E-freight can only support that.
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