The ‘holy grail’ of end-to-end visibility: As cross-border e-commerce volumes continue to grow on a global basis and become an ever-increasing proportion of flown air freight, the sector is continuing to adapt to attract, and accommodate the needs of, customers from that business. Some of the most interesting discussions at this year’s ACHL conference centred around this topic, as highlighted in the ACHL Conference Report (pages 22-40).
As DB Schenker’s Asok Kumar notes, the airport-to-airport portion “is standard”, but for “what happens at the front and the back you need different systems – different kinds of scanning and labelling, down to a level which is more the integrators’ type of business”.
Some air freight carriers and logistics companies have been exploring a ‘hybrid’ model to provide an end-to-end air logistics solution for the thousands of e-retailers around the world, many of them SMEs, who would like to compete with the big players.

MSC Air Cargo’s Jannie Davel noted that on the inbound delivery side, “the cost explodes when you come to LTL delivery” and most companies don’t have the economies of scale to make final-mile deliveries work at an affordable cost to end users. Getting a really efficient, integrated solution for the whole air logistics journey, with full visibility, is also still a real challenge – although data-sharing initiatives like IATA’s One Record offer hope of significant improvements. But the challenges are even greater when it requires visibility across multiple transport modes – “the holy grail”, as Kumar described it.
Whereas the big e-commerce players can help overcome some of these issues by pre-labelling on the origin side, the wider air freight sector has not managed to achieve this, because the technology was not yet there to support it, Davel notes.

In many ways, that’s what the big e-commerce players have become – really efficient logistics systems. Amazon manages it primarily by feeding national distribution centres via surface transport, whereas Alibaba’s logistics arm Cainiao is attempting to build a global distribution network that can deliver to customers from China within 72 hours, which in most cases involves air freight.
It’s now got that down to 5 days in some European target markets, in part by creating regional air freight hubs, such as at Liège Airport, as highlighted in the Europe Report (pages 6-14).
To achieve that 5-day target has required it to get the cargo handling of its main air capacity providers under its own control, albeit operated via a third-party (WFS in Liège). And the recent partnership between Saudia Cargo, Cainiao and WFS (page 59) highlights the potential of this collaborative model to deliver a new level of air logistics capability to e-commerce customers.