2014: making e-AWB happen

~~2014: making e-AWB happen
Collaboratively and globally
This year has brought a steady increase to e-AWB adoption, with more industry participants taking it on and adopting it. Last August was the single fastest e-AWB growth ever reported in one month, with a global increase of 2%. Adoption speed is now four times that of the same period last year, and this acceleration is felt across the board, with strong growth in Africa, Americas, Europe and North Asia.
Lufthansa Cargo’s dedicated e-AWB team: a new best practice
In 2014, Lufthansa Cargo has set-up an electronic air waybill (e-AWB) rollout team to achieve paperless technology implementation. The e-AWB Global Rollout project is a part of the Lufthansa Cargo2020 initiative that aims to a complete digitization of the supply chain. The dedicated team conducted a series of workshops with local sales and handling staff to inform about the advantages of the single process implementation (pdf) as well as the Lufthansa Cargo Data Quality initiative. This will guarantee data consistency between the paper air waybill and the electronic version.
In September, the e-AWB Global Rollout team started to enable a new station in Paris – Charles de Gaulle. It is the seventh e-AWB active station in Europe excluding Germany, together with Vienna, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Helsinki, and both Milan’s Malpensa and Segrate airports. Zurich and Budapest also started this month their enabling process.
This comes after a busy summer for Lufthansa’s electronic rollout: only in July, they opened 175 new stations able to receive cargo without any paper AWB. These stations cover more than 70% of all shipments, representing 50% of Lufthansa stations worldwide. The airline also opened a new station in Bangalore, and started to enable others in Seoul - Incheon and Tokyo – Narita.
More forwarders join the e-AWB Multilateral Agreement
Lufthansa’s progress is not isolated. Contributing to this acceleration are joint industry initiatives launched in the Nordics, India, USA, Germany that are driving this trend. More than ever, industry collaboration is a key component of success.
The Multilateral e-AWB Agreement (MeA) is one of the enabler to e-AWB global adoption. Over the last 2 months, regional initiatives have dramatically increased the number of signees to the MeA. In the Nordic countries, a campaign brought in over 90 parent companies to sign the MeA. In Korea, a big push from the local offices resulted in 35% of the total local freight forwarders signing the MeA (signifying about 80 new parent companies).