PAPERLESS
FREIGHT
RECORD
BREAKING
Could ONE Record make paperless air
freight a reality? Chris Lewis has high
hopes for the latest sector initiative.
Could airfreight fi nally
be on the cusp of going
paperless? As writers
about the airfreight industry,
we at ALI are acutely aware
that this has been said many
times in the past, only for the
promised electronic nirvana
to fail to materialise. However,
could IATA’s latest initiative,
ONE Record, fi nally bring
about fundamental change to
an industry that has remained
wedded to paper in the age
of apps, online banking and
electronic shopping?
Floodgates closed
Gerry Burgin, now Principal
of consultants Gerry Burgin
Cargo Associates but with a
lifetime in freight forwarding,
remembers transmitting the
fi rst forwarder’s air waybill
back in 1993. He thought
at the time that it would open the fl oodgates to electronic
communications of all kinds in airfreight – but it wasn’t to be.
The percentage of air waybills that are electronic only fairly
recently broke through the 50% barrier, while scores of other
documents used in airfreight remain largely bits of paper.
But fi rst, a little more history. In the 1960s and 1970s, telexes
were widely adopted. From these evolved the fi rst electronic
messaging system, Cargo IMP which, however, was still based on
telex technology with all the limitations that that implied, such
as the length of lines that could be transmitted. All Cargo IMP did
was to put information that had previously been printed on to a
piece of paper on to an electronic screen.
Cargo IMP was updated over the years, but pressure was
mounting for something more modern, so a version of Cargo IMP
that used XML (Extensible Markup Language, the format used to
transmit documents over the Internet) was developed.
However, XML in the airfreight industry was only partly
successful. Some, but not all, airlines adopted it (along with the
larger freight forwarders) but with not all carriers supporting it,
XML uptake was patchy as many airlines baulked at the cost of
updating their legacy computers. That in turn meant that freight
forwarders were faced with the cost of maintaining two systems
(Cargo IMP and XML) so understandably, a large proportion
decided that they might as well stick with paper documents. As a
result, take-up of the electronic air waybill (e-AWB) was poor.
XML uptake was
patchy as many
airlines baulked at
the cost of updating
their legacy
computers
Gerry Burgin, Gerry Burgin Cargo
Associates
18 August 2019 www.airlogisticsinternational.com
Sarayut Thaneerat / Alamy Stock Photo
/www.airlogisticsinternational.com