Current Situation

With so much effort, it is hard to believe that we still see e-AWB penetration at 28.8%, up by 0.8% from previous month. The positive growth trend continues, however, the rate of growth is not sufficient to meet the industry target of 45% by the end of 2015. The industry adoption needs to grow at least by 2% every month, which means a significant acceleration of e-AWB implementation.

Certainly it’s worth remembering that in December 2004, the IATA Board mandated IATA to lead an industry-wide project whose aim is to take paper out of the air supply chain, and create the conditions to replace the existing processes with new processes where the industry, and governments, rely on the electronic exchange of information between the parties to facilitate the movement of freight.

Barriers 

The biggest objection from shippers is the investment required.  Imagine the complexity and cost of developing a system that sends electronic messages for every document that currently accompanies a shipment. The issue is further complicated by the fact that several documents do not currently have a single globally accepted message standard. One of the options is to share scanned images. In my view this is actually an acceptable way of doing business. 

While shippers may complain that this process causes additional workload, in effect they might want to look at how they currently archive their documents. I am sure that many are archived onto disk storage for later retrieval and it may well be that they bring forward the archiving activity to be able to share scanned images with their trading partners. 

There are many forward thinking shippers and they have some fantastic systems, but there are still some who use the forwarder as their shipping department and are more than comfortable for the forwarder to take full responsibility for managing the entire documentation requirements. This then puts the burden on the forwarder to produce and send the relevant messages on behalf of the shipper. For this to happen the forwarder will need to develop his or her system to be able to do this. I believe that this is unlikely. 

The way forward

The feedback I get from the industry is there is still a lack of knowledge of e-freight and that knowledge still needs to be imparted to everyone. IATA’s efforts in this area with their e-freight handbook is an extremely comprehensive guide which explains in detail how to implement e-freight, however it is only available in English. Adding a Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese versions would help. Also it would be great to see a simplified guide that explains to a freight forwarder what he actually needs to do to participate in the program. 

IATA/FIATA/TIACA/GACAG, keep going, you have really raised awareness, now we need to raise understanding. An agreed simplified guide to the industry will remove the mystery and promote adoption. Use local industry meetings to explain what needs to be done and how to do it. 

Governments, some great examples above, please sign the required treaties to allow paper free trading. Work with trade to identify ways to simplify data exchange across all modes of transport. Use incentives. If anyone can make this happen, you can. 

Finally, as individuals, we all have a responsibility for implementing e-freight happen. Over the last year mindsets have changed, but we still need to walk-the-walk and move from words to action. Why don’t we key stakeholders set ourselves a personal target to process at least 75% of the shipments that we are involved in as e-freight consignments by end of 2016 and then do everything in our power to meet this goal. Those of us that achieve this goal can look back and say ‘I really made a difference’. 

http://www.iata.org/whatwedo/cargo/e/eawb/Documents/e-awb-buzz-july-2015.pdf

e-Cargo Buzz September 2015

Over 50% of e-AWB traffic originates from 9 top airports!

In August 2015, e-AWB global penetration is at 31.7%, up by 2.7% from previous month. This is the largest month over month growth in 2015 to date. It is interesting to highlight that more than half of the total global e-AWB volumes are done by 9 airports, HKG, SIN, ICN, DXB, AMS, TPE, CDG, LHR and ORD. On average each of these airports have 39% e-AWB penetration. Other top airports for e-AWB include FRA, ATL, PVG, and JNB. But there are many other airports where e-AWB is also implemented. In total, e-AWBs have been performed from 456 different origins in August 2015 up from 358 in August 2014, an increase of 28%!