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Air Canada's CargoAware RFID track & trace expects to cut dwell time

AIR CANADA CARGO, having found new applications for radio frequency identification (RFID), is marketing it through a company called Franwell as a new brand, CargoAware.

Franwell, together with View Technologies, use RFID antennas to track and trace items and ULD containers through warehouses and record movement in real time.

Franwell project chief Michael Morey, former director of operational strategy at Air Canada Cargo, aims to achieve piece-level tracking in real time, reports New York's Air Cargo World.

"This is a major challenge for all carriers. When done manually, this creates errors and leads to a lot of non-value-added work," said Mr Morey.

The real return on investment comes in the form of asset tracking in warehouses and cargo facilities, he said.

"But beyond track and trace, you can discover inefficiencies you never considered, such as poor forklift deployment, bad floor plan configuration and time-consuming methods in build-up," he said.

"We also develop rules. For instance, if you tender goods for a specific flight time, and we have not seen these goods yet at the build-up by a certain deadline, then the system will send out a warning," Mr Morey said.

When the goods are accepted, customers print a label with a readable barcode. "We add a chip with information relative to that piece, which can be read by antennas in the ceiling.

"With the data on the chip, we can message back to the customer to say the goods have been seen on the export dock, and that they are now in the storage area," he said.

"Right now the full installation at Air Canada is done in Montreal and Frankfurt. And we have since installed the system in Boston, New York JFK and Chicago.

"The rollout is proceeding at a pretty aggressive pace now, with about two to three station installations per week for the next several months.

"We intend to pretty much be completed with Air Canada by the end of November, with Toronto being the last one.

"Being the hub, 75 to 80 per cent of Air Canada's traffic goes through there. So that's going to be a big one.

Asked about other carriers, Mr Morey said: "Yes, that will be my job. They call me the 'bear trapper'. I go out and trap the bears, bring them home, and then our guys skin 'me. Without naming names, there are several clients that are doing formal site assessments.

"There are also a number of facilities in Europe, the Middle East and Asia that are being built brand new, and we've been asked for input so that they can build the solution into the new facilities rather than retrofit.

I expect by year's end, we should have some of these at a stage where they're ready to make a public commitment," he said.