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Air cargo transport should be reliable and visible: Cargo iQ

CARGO iQ is urging the air cargo industry to turn its attention towards differentiating products based on reliability levels and improved visibility instead of focusing on accelerating transportation times.

According to Cargo iQ executive director Ariaen Zimmerman, shippers were not necessarily willing to pay extra for faster times, and if they were, they could use a whole array of existing air cargo products or even choose one of the integrators under a completely different cost model.

He added that only two of the 5.4 days of air cargo's average door-to-door journey time were under carrier control, offering little room for improvement, London's Air Cargo News.

"We should create a reality where if people are unhappy about a product they can go out and buy a better product or talk to an airline and ask if there is a way to create another product that better suits their needs," said Mr Zimmerman.

"People should be perfectly happy to value, for instance, an 85 per cent reliability within a certain performance window at a specific price level and then accept that a higher reliability at a stricter performance window should be valued at a different price."

He noted that at present products that have a lower level of reliability and offer cheaper prices pull down overall prices because more reliable products are not able to use their service levels as a differentiating selling point. Quality needs to be visible to be valued.

He added that offering various levels of reliability could also help ensure that aircraft are as fully utilised as possible - with cargo booked with a lower reliability level or bigger performance window offloaded when necessary to make way for higher priority cargo - and yet still making sure all shipments are under control and being managed to perform within their committed service levels.

This type of service would also need high levels of visibility, so customers know where their cargo is in the supply chain, something that could also help reduce costs.

"A lack of control is the consistent factor that is actually driving costs, meaning if a shipment is supposed to be somewhere and it doesn't show up, without any preceding information, it triggers a lot of corrective actions.

"On the provider side, it triggers losses and capacity underutilisation and on the shipper or consignee side it may lead to delays in production processes. On top of all this is time lost to the extra communication between various parties to resolve the issue."