Adding agility and speed with Champ's Cargospot
Transport is often seen as the harbinger of broader economy. In a marketplace where increased competition and slowing growth are common, carriers are intent on securing every possible dollar of revenue by reducing operational costs.
In fact, about 71 percent of air cargo executives would consider new cargo management systems to lower overall costs, improve business agility and speed deployment, according to Accenture 2015 survey Air Cargo Research.
The complexity of the air cargo business demands a dynamic business strategy that allows carriers to quickly and efficiently adjust their business strategy in response to fluctuating market conditions. Those that manage to do this get a distinctive compe-titive advantage.
Aviation currently provides 58 million jobs & contributes $2.4 trillion in GDP based on the analysis of the International Air Transport Association (IATA). This is expected to increase to 105 million jobs and $6 trillion in GDP in 2034 with demand for air transport projected to grow at an all time high.
Air Cargo Update met with Lee Booth, Champ Cargosystems SA VP Global Products, to discuss how the company’s cargo management system Cargospot adds agility to air cargo business.
Cargospot
Cargospot is an end-to-end system supporting the customers’ business by managing their complete business process.
This ranges from capacity control, pricing and reservations of the airline ensuring the best utilization and yield, through to operational handling of the shipments in the warehouse, making sure that the cargo is at the right place at the right time to allow aircraft to depart on-time.
Finally, and most importantly, accounting for the shipments as soon as they’re flown ensuring cash-flow is as optimized as possible.
Lee Booth notes, “CHAMP has created this management platform as an integrated, yet modular system. That means information need only be captured once at source and is then available for use by the rest of the business processes until the shipments are accounted and the money is in the bank.”
Cargospot is built with the following integrated modules:
- Airline
- GSA
- Handling
- Revenue accounting
- Business Intelligence
Cargospot is a community system with more than 130 customers benefitting from it. These can range from small to large airlines, full freighter operators, mixed-fleet operators to belly only airlines.
It also has a wide range of GSAs and GHAs from small single station operators through to large, world-wide ground handlers. All of these customers benefit from the CHAMP community, because all enhancements and regulatory changes, which are made to Cargospot, are immediately available to the complete community.
To support this, Cargospot is highly configurable such that the customer can choose which features to activate and which business process behavior the system should support.
CHAMP’s solution does not just include Cargospot – Cargospot is integrated with other operational management components (ULD management and Freighter Weight & Balance) as well as our eFreight (Customs [Traxon Global Customs], Quality [CDMP, MIP]) and our community integration services (TraxoncargoHUB).
A Lego system
“CHAMP is a one-stop shop for our customers. It is a Modular solution that gets tailored in line with clients’ needs. Many think of it as a Lego system, which can be the full set (Booking, invoicing, business intelligence, handling, customs, quality monitoring) or just the few that you need,” explains Booth.
Furthermore, it seamlessly integrates with other CHAMP or 3rd party software. Therefore, it can be as comprehensive as the client needs it.
Cargospot is highly configurable with all customers on a single source, although each customer has its own system. To achieve this, Cargospot is rich with configurations, allowing Customer A to have a feature behaving one way and Customer B having the same feature behaving a different way. These configurations are set during the implementation phase of a customer’s go-live.
“We have many customers who have more than one airline in their group, allowing them to perform revenue accounting for each airline in their group,” said Booth.
Cost effective management
CHAMP has the largest air cargo community demonstrating that it can provide cost-effective management solutions helping its Cargospot clients to achieve savings in improved yield-control, reducing costs, optimizing resource and overhead allocations.
Additionally, CHAMP’s solutions are offered as a software as a Service, hence the customer only pays on usage, ensuring an attractive, and cost-effective proposition.
“CHAMP believes that it should benefit when the customer benefits, so we charge for our services on a per-use basis. This means that our customers can focus on their growth, knowing that their system will grow with them and they will only be charged for what they use. This is a strong benefit to customers who previously had to provision their own systems and bear the cost fully, irrespective of their business performance,” said Booth.
“CHAMP is a leading end-to-end solution provider to the air cargo industry. As such, we also have a messaging and connectivity platform TraxoncargoHUB, which currently connects over 3000 forwarders, GSAs, GHA, Postal authorities, shippers to over 100+ airlines.
“Forwarders using TraxoncargoHUB as their Cargo Community Solution (CCS) Provider, will benefit from messaging services regardless of protocol and messaging type. Cargospot also is able to handle C-XML message.”
Business intelligence module
Cargospot not only produces reports, but also offers a Business Intelligence module that allows customers to visualize their business performance as well as being able to customize their reports needed for their businesses.
Its offering also includes SLA and CDMP modules, which monitor the performance of the shipments, and alerts should there be any deviation from the committed service levels.
“As Cargospot is an integrated system, all data is available for each ‘modular view’ as soon as it is in the system (either manually captured, or more normally when received by messages from other parties in the supply chain),” Booth explained.
“That means that the revenue accounting department can see bookings as soon as they’re made (or received) in the system by the airline. Equally they can see the moment shipments have departed origin – they don’t need to wait for a ‘data-feed’, or worse, recapture the data manually. This is a significant boost to productivity,” he added.
Cargospot is fully integrated into the industry settlement systems so it allows the invoice to be generated as early as possible, improving the airline’s cash flow.
“CHAMP understands that our prospects already have systems in place to manage their day-to-day operations. They may have their own in-house systems for example, but with technology evolving, they may want to make a switch to newer IT and prefer to start slowly and start replacing one module at a time for pricing or continuity,” said Booth.
“All CHAMP products integrate with each other or 3rd party software. CHAMP understands that the air cargo community needs to collaborate and has hence put in efforts to integrate with other systems on the market. Our Cargospot portfolio is built on a platform that enables integration with external software to maximize benefits and efficiencies for our clients,” he added.
Digitalization drives growth
The industry is moving to digitization primarily through the e-AWB initiative. CHAMP drives to this automation through its e-AWB ready systems.
IATA said two of the Top 5 airlines ranking for e-AWB penetration are relying on Cargospot to get them to this position. Four out of the Top 10 airlines ranking for e-AWB volume make use of our TraxoncargoHUB providing distribution and integration among the supply chain stakeholders.
And five of the Top 10 freight forwarders ranking for e-AWB volume are connected to the air cargo community via CHAMP’s TraxoncargoHUB.
” The company serves over 200 airlines and GSAs, and links these with some 3,000 forwarders and GHAs worldwide. CHAMP’s solutions help its customers and their clients adapt to critical and continuous changes in air transport logistics to meet global trade demands.”
Market leadership not only comes about from a strong service offering, but also from the capabilities to adept and evolve with the ever-changing market and regulatory requirements.
“I think this gets down to the full offering, from entire air cargo supply chain portfolio on offer, the ability to implement small, medium and large complex projects, the service provided, the ability to support your client base with day-to-day performance, but also with their ambitions for the future. So it’s the IT, technology, innovation, the people with air cargo know-how.
“CHAMP has 475+ Cargo professionals and is fully dedicated to air cargo IT. This is something very unique. We have implemented 150+ core management projects with airlines and handlers in 75 different countries. So we have obtained strong expertise in different business processes across different clients, enabling us to not only provide the IT solutions, but also the consultancy on how to best merry processes and IT together,” concludes Booth.
About CHAMP Cargosystems
CHAMP Cargosystems provides the most comprehensive range of integrated IT solutions and distribution services for the air cargo transport chain. The portfolio spans core management systems, messaging services, and eCargo solutions. These include applications to meet customs and security requirements, quality optimization as well as e-freight and mobility needs. The products and services are well known under the Cargospot, Traxon and Logitude brands.
The company serves over 200 airlines and GSAs, and links these with some 3,000 forwarders and GHAs worldwide. CHAMP’s solutions help its customers and their clients adapt to critical and continuous changes in air transport logistics to meet global trade demands.
CHAMP Cargosystems is headquartered in Luxembourg and operates offices in London, Zurich, Frankfurt /Main and Manila.
In air cargo moving to digital even has more benefits:
Limit the amount of data that needs re-entering across the other supply chain stakeholders Save time & increase accuracy
Less costs for printing, storing and transporting the documents on the planes
Ability to optimize load factor of aircrafts
Ability to analyze better overall performances and improve the processes to streamline air cargo, make it even faster and keep shippers and consignees happy.
