The aviation sector has made headway on digitalization, but industry leaders said more needs to be done to accelerate this progress.

During the Executive Roundtable at the World Cargo Symposium 2024 in Hong Kong, industry leaders emphasized the need for enhanced collaboration among supply chain players and increased regulatory support to harmonize processes, describing current efforts of individual companies as “fragmented.”

Willie Walsh, director general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA), said there are many opportunities in digital transformation from a cargo point of view to improve efficiency, cost base, and customer service, as he acknowledged that the pace of change on air cargo “has been slow.”

“I suspect things will accelerate without question,” he told the panel. “So, while the pace of change has been slow, we have been moving in the right direction. We just need to continue to focus on that direction and pick up pace.”

Kirsten de Bruijn, executive vice president of cargo at WestJet Cargo in Calgary, called for “better alignment” throughout the supply chain and better agreement on each party's various responsibilities.

“Often, we are not aligned with the speed of implementation or on what our focus is. So I think alignment throughout the whole supply chain other than just within airlines is crucial to get stuff done,” she said during the executive roundtable, noting that this alignment should include freight forwarders and shippers.

The WestJet Cargo executive noted that supply chain processes are complicated by the individual systems used by each company.

“Each one wants its own warehouse system, its customs system; then you have the country system and various management systems. We have built all these spaghetti systems and never really looked into the alignment,” de Bruijn added.

“As an industry, we need to sit together and figure out the standardizations that we want to work on to facilitate the process further because there are still a lot of variables in the whole supply chain that we have now.”

Vivien Lau, CEO of Jardine Aviation Services in Hong Kong, said adopting standard industry regulations would also help facilitate the digitalization of the aviation sector.

“We’re all aware that the supply chain has many stakeholders, and I think the critical point sometimes is regulation. If we could get support from the regulators, that would also help us move things faster,” she added.

Michael Steen, the New York-based CEO of Atlas Air Worldwide, acknowledged the difficulty of implementing agreements on some platforms and processes in a “fragmented” and “complex” industry. “Based on the fragmentation in our industry, you can digitize a lot on a stand-alone basis, but interfaces between the different stakeholders in the supply chain become ever so critical,” he told the panel, noting the shift from B2B to B2C driven by e-commerce.

“Individual progress is being made, and what IATA is doing with One Record is phenomenal … but I would like to put some emphasis on redesigning processes,” Steen added, noting that the industry needs to look into redesigning these processes, making the necessary investments, and creating community platforms with standards that can serve the various customer groups in the supply chain.

“They have to be standards for sure because no one company in our industry can serve the entire supply chain; it just doesn’t work that way,” Steen added.

Steen also urged the industry to work with authorities to flesh out industry standards.

“I can’t underscore the importance of the role that the lawmakers play to ensure we have harmonized processes … we need to get more engagement, more direct dialogue between the industry and the lawmakers in order to ensure that we have harmonized processes going forward,” he said.

“Some of the targets that are being said are very one-sided, and they don’t take account of the full economic picture. So that’s something that we need to get done.”

Lau echoed Steen’s comments, stressing the need for the industry to have common standards. “With all those digitalization projects, we do need to collaborate as an industry because if we are only working on our own individual companies, those data cannot talk,” she said.

“It should be the industry driving the new direction, new digital wave, rather than a company driving its own.”

By Charlee C. Delavin

Asia Cargo News | Hong Kong