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Air Canada's cargo chief warns of integrator threat to forwarding

AIR forwarders, to ensure survival, must protect themselves from express delivery giants, and need new regulations to do it, says Air Canada cargo chief Tim Strauss.

"If we don't get this straightened out, forwarding will not fully participate in e-commerce and all will default to the integrator world," he said.

"At the end of the day, this is about our commercial viability. If there's no common language, nobody will want to go invest in its potential," said Mr Strauss, former vice president of cargo for Hawaiian Airlines and managing director of global operations for Delta Air Lines Cargo.

While there is much talk of innovation, Mr Strauss said ground rules need to be in place to make use of new technology, he told New York's Air Cargo World.

Mr Strauss said the big problem was data handling. "We have all this customs data, but who's going to collect it, and how is it going to be done? How do we get data in and out of customs quickly in our partly paper, partly paperless environment?

"We have to decide what the standards are. We need to have a common language, so we can determine what is in place today and what should it look like in seven or eight years - hopefully sooner than that," he said.

"We need IATA to lay out a standard, like they did with the Cargo XML language. If we can get the World Customs Organisation to participate, we can agree on standards for customs data," said Mr Strauss.

"IBM has completed a huge project that's built custom-made for the supply chain business. It's got the security we need and it's in a neat bucket, so you're not crossing over where you don't need to," he said.

Going forward, Mr. Strauss was positive and hopeful about tax reform from the Trump administration. "The PMI [Purchasing Managers Index] is very strong and has been for most of this year," he said.

"People are buying up for inventory. If the Trump administration makes any modification in the US tax laws to benefit businesses, that will put accelerant on the growth out of North America, which we share.

"So that has an interesting halo effect for us here at Air Canada. I think it's going to be a good year," he said.