Tech Summer 2022 Recap: Digitalizing your air freight business in a sustainable manner
“The digital age is changing the air cargo business landscape”, we couldn’t have summed it up better than Nathanael de Tarade, Chief Executive Officer at Wiremind Cargo, one of our guest speakers in our second installation of our annual Tech Summer webinar.
As a digital solutions provider, CargoAi’s key objective of the Tech Summer webinar is to create a space for all stakeholders from the industry to come together as a community, to discuss the present challenges and consider the future needs.
The shift to digitalization has led to a rise in efficiency and lower costs, but it also poses sustainability challenges. How can industry players adapt and keep ahead of the curve? We need to leverage software solutions that can help streamline processes with a sustainable approach. We’ve recapped some of the highlights in this video as well as below.
Tech Day: Build a tech-enabled business
Guest speaker, Justin Baird, CTO at Wiremind Cargo opened the Tech Summer this year with a high. Justin shared Microsoft’s revolutionary capabilities, which included a ground-breaking, and successful, experiment to keep a data-center underwater – significantly reducing the energy consumption required for cooling. Microsoft’s Sustainability Cloud was also a key feature in his presentation, tying the two themes – digitalization and sustainability - of this year’s Tech Summer together.
While inspiring us that the sky is the limit, Justin emphasized it is still essential to evaluate business needs where technology is needed and work towards acquiring the right technology when necessary. “Digitalization is a transformation essential for every business. They need to embrace the ability of digital technology to collect data, establish trends in order to inform better decisions.”
Radu Palamariu, our second guest speaker for the day, Alcott Global’s Global Head of Supply Chain and Logistics Practice reminded us that, “While technology is the key to the future-proofing the air cargo industry, it will be people that power that successful transition.”
Product Day: Bring Agility into your digital journey
After setting the scene on the first day to consider technological integration alongside business needs and how to best leverage human factors for success, Elena Volkova, Chief Product Officer at CargoAi continued the conversation on bringing the Agile approach to daily workflows. “An agile approach tends to produce higher product quality as well as reduced risks”, said Elena. Daily Scrum meetings and short Sprints allow increased project control and faster ROI, making it a culture and operational process all businesses should consider.
In line with the Agile approach, Mads Porsborg, Manager, Solutions and Value Engineering at Project 44 advocated outsourcing via APIs. APIs, which Mads also called “Smart Connective Tissue” helps sync data between companies. Each business stays away from the need to invest heavily in forming internal research, product or development teams, also reducing risk. Through APIs, the airfreight industry as a whole can tap into the same data within the ecosystem to enable more robust analytics.
Marketing & Sales Day: Customer Success through digital empowerment
At the end of the day, what is the real aim of digitalization for all of us in the industry? Ensuring and improving Customer Success, of course. Magali Beauregard, Chief Commercial Officer at CargoAi began by contrasting the legacy customer lifecycle – traditionally linear in its approach and operating in silos – with the necessity to migrate to a considering a different customer journey that is non-linear and an approach that empowers and enables teams to align around the same data sets and KPIs. “Leveraging MarTech solutions”, she said,” facilitates this transition, for example, by ensuring that one’s CRM solution is always linking with Analytics”.
Nathanael capped off the final day by breaking down the differences between Data, Information, and Knowledge, and how each build on the next to create an Action that produces the best results for Customer Success. He also demonstrated the clear flow in how this gets integrated in a MarTech solution, which helps Customer Success teams meet business goals together.
Cocktails and Connections
In line with our third and final day, CargoAi hosted Singapore's first exclusive networking session between major players in the air cargo industry to close our Tech Summer Webinar series on a high note.
Wrapping Up
One point brought across was that there is a clear difference “Digitisation” and “Digitalisation”. Simply put, Digitisation is giving a manual and inefficient process a digital spin (i.e. instead of calling each airline to obtain a quote, sending an email to each airline); whereas Digitalisation rethinks the way the work is done so operations can be streamlined and costs can be reduced (i.e. putting in a search query into a platform and having an aggregated list of results which can be filtered).
Recognizing that the air cargo industry has evolved tremendously in the last few decades, forward-thinking digital solutions providers are redefining workflows to help the airfreight industry reach new benchmarks in procurement decisions, revenue management, HR and customer success. Through collaboration and outsourcing within the air freight ecosystem, we can be confident of achieving major milestones to propel this dynamic industry forward.
If this recap has piqued your interest, click here to request a recording for each day of the Tech Summer 2022 webinar.
Tech Summer will be back next year and we look forward to connecting with you once again!
CargoAi offers a complete range of digital air cargo solutions to freight forwarders, airlines and GSAs, including CargoMART, a SaaS booking application; CargoCONNECT, which integrates directly into TMS and ERP systems, and CargoINTEL, an integrated sustainability and business intelligence solution that spans the entire portfolio.