Cargo iQ pilots solution to close visibility gap in road freight

Cross-stakeholder organization Cargo iQ has initiated a pilot study to enhance shipment visibility and increase speed in the road freight segment of an air cargo shipment’s journey, with Emirates Airlines, Jan de Rijk, and software company CargoHub co-operating for the trial.

The pilot will test new Cargo iQ Road Feeder Services (RFS) specifications for practicality, ensuring that the message standards to be exchanged between CargoHub, the trucking company and the airline work in practice. 

The main objective of the pilot is to close the communication gap between the truck driver, the trucking company’s head office, and the airline.  

“Cargo iQ is setting the milestone requirements for status updates, indicating which messages the trucking companies have to send, and CargoHub will standardize the content of the messages by ‘translating’ it for the airlines,” said Lothar Moehle, Executive Director, Cargo iQ. 

“Ultimately, the RFS specification will be integrated into the Cargo iQ Master Operating Plan and the potential IT service solutions will be standardized to fit the Cargo iQ requirements, allowing members to choose one of the potential providers.” 

Pilot participant CargoHub is providing the Collaborative Decision Making (CDM) platform, which provides transparent and predictable information on truck movements to handling agents and/or airlines and provides capacity and cargo availability information to trucking companies.  

Truck movement information includes all air shipment data relating to trucking planning information and start and end loading and unloading dates and times. 

“The goal is to minimize loading and unloading times, thus increasing the speed of air cargo transportation by road,” said Raoul Paul, Chief Executive Officer, CargoHub. 

“At the same time, airlines will benefit from end-to-end supply chain visibility of air cargo shipments subjected to road transport.  

“Our team has worked hard over the past two years to build an innovative platform based on the latest technologies to provide end-to-end digital logistics and transport supply chain visibility.”

With the creation of the data model to ease communication between the trucking CDM platform and the airlines, all stakeholders involved in the transport of an air freight shipment can plan and monitor the transportation status of their shipments combined with all related truck movement information, whether messaging or API technology is being used.  

Emirates Airlines is also part of the collaborative effort to standardize operational status updates for air cargo carried on trucks.  

“We recognized that not all trucking companies have equal system capabilities and to make the standards openly available and attractive to use for all truckers, we had to provide an easy way for all to participate,” said Laurent Lebouille, Chair of the Cargo iQ RFS sub working group and Manager Process, Planning and Project Delivery at SkyCargo, Emirates Airlines. 

“That meant we had to find software-as-a-service companies that could deliver the kind of status updates in the formats that we were looking for from an industry perspective.  

“After a collaborative extensive market search, we found several providers that offered the kind of services that are needed to support the smaller trucking providers without their own system.  

“Now we just have to show that it is possible in practice.” 

CargoHub, Emirates Airlines, and Jan de Rijk are currently performing various air cargo shipment scenarios with live shipments carried on trucks, with a second pilot to include additional participants already in the planning.