Results of 2021 Quality Rallies

Over the last six months, Cargo iQ members took part in the organization’s bi-annual quality rallies, where members work in teams to examine the performance of a particular metric or milestone to identify any weak points and their causes. Members choose station combinations, lanes, milestones or simply a set of warehouses in an area and get to work analyzing several aspects of operations and their corresponding results.

“It adds a fun element to your regular issue-identifying and solving routine. The best part is, most times the presented results form part of a model that can be adopted by other members to solve similar discrepancies, instead of reinventing the wheel each time they want to get rid of a pain-point,” says Megha Palkar, Assistant Manager, Cargo iQ.

Participants from Stage 1 of the Q-rally held in Budapest in November 2018

Six organizations partnered up virtually this year to form three teams, with Lufthansa and Schenker, Cargolux and Cargo Start, and Kuehne+Nagel and Unisys competing to identify the greatest tangible performance improvement in their respective areas, before presenting their findings for members to vote on in a live poll.

Lufthansa and Schenker

Lufthansa and Schenker worked together to examine new ways of reporting that would identify issues rather than just showing the current status.

“Two new reports have been invented for this purpose and introduced to the community,” explains Alexandros Cabadakis, System Integration Specialist, Global IT Management Air and Ocean, DB Schenker. “The first one helps to identify mismatches between booking and FWB messages; the second one helps to identify missing entries in ENCORE.

“If the business is expanding between two partners of the industry, the partners sometimes forget to add the new trade lanes to ENCORE accordingly. The penetration is decreasing because the maintained trade lanes do not reflect business anymore. It is then hard to locate these missing entries. The new report helps to locate and add these missing entries. These reports helped to increase the penetration rate between Schenker and Lufthansa from 83% to 91%.”

Cargolux and Cargo Start

Cargolux and Cargo Start’s goal was to increase the percentage of SME shipments tracked in Cargo iQ.

“Unlike what happens in the standard Cargo iQ process, within the SME process the bilateral communication between different CDMP starts with the CDMP-F (the provider of the forwarder) sending the first message (the SME message). Unfortunately, a considerable percentage of SME shipments is not tracked in Cargo iQ due to missing replies from the CDMP-C (the provider of the carrier),” says Gianni Mauri, Director Business Processes Air Cargo, Cargo Start.

“At the moment we started the Q Rally – April 2021 – the percentage of SME shipments not tracked in Cargo iQ was around 15%. With Cargolux, we agreed to focus the investigation on the root causes of the failure or incomplete response of the Cargolux CDMP-C.

“Root causes were identified and assigned to the party in charge of implementing the solution (internal or external). At the end of the Q Rally – October 2021 – we measured the achievement: the percentage of SME shipments not tracked with Cargolux decreased from 14% to 7%, while the Cargolux AWB penetration with SME partners increased from 70% to 93%.

“Cargolux and Cargo Start have agreed to continue the exercise to further improve the figures and the quality.”

Kuehne+Nagel and Unisys

Kuehne+Nagel and Unisys explored issues relating to ENCORE files not being received, Malaysian Airlines coverage, and newly acquired forwarders.

“K+N was not receiving the latest ENCORE files for Air Canada, American Airlines and Delta Air Lines. Unysis has shared the latest ENCORE files for Delta and Air Canada with K+N. The opening-closing times were outdated, but thanks to our joint effort this has been rectified,” explains Ilija Zdjelar, Senior Corporate Cargo iQ and Carrier Communication Support Officer, Kuehne+Nagel.

Separately, they sought to improve the FWB Path of Configuration for Malaysian Airlines as AWBs for K+N partners were not being reported in Unisys Cargo In-Transit and the FWBs are being sent to CCN. Changes were also made to support newly acquired K+N forwarders.

“Shipments handled by our newly acquired forwarders have not been taken into consideration leading to a drop-off in Cargo iQ coverage. To integrate them under K+N we have suggested a three phase approach: Phase I – Implement CFI and Translago forwarders under K+N. Phase II - Implement Quick and Sterling forwarders separately as partners but KAN will be the CDMP-F provider. Phase III – Implement Apex forwarders separately as partners but KAN will be the CDMP-F provider.”

Additionally, the team created a CM02 congruency report. “K+N created a congruency report in order to compare the data on a weekly basis. In addition, we created a carrier route map, mapping details to bring visibility of all the Cargo iQ data together for each MAWB.

Above: Cargo iQ coverage graph showing the results of Kuehne+Nagel and Unysis' collaboration

“During our collaboration the main KPIs tracked were: Cargo iQ coverage and Cargo iQ congruency, meaning that we are comparing our CM02 list and their CM02 list of shipments and analyzing discrepancies.”

While the Lufthansa and Schenker team collected the most votes and was therefore deemed the winner, all three teams received awards for their valuable findings.

Story edited by meantime.global