The starting point
Aiming to provide a customer-first booking experience.
In an industry-first move, AirBridgeCargo and CargoLogicAir, two of the world’s fastest-growing all-cargo airlines, announced their partnership with cargo.one in early summer 2019. The joint objective was to become the first all-cargo airlines to offer their capacities for digital booking.
cargo.one and the airlines had first met at World Cargo Symposium 2019. Shortly after, at the Transport Logistic fair in Munich, they announced the ambitious goal to complete the integration and change management process until the end of summer. This was in an effort to offer customers a seamless and fully digital booking experience via cargo.one as soon as possible.
“Instead of talking about the mythical task of digitalization, we clicked. We walked away from the meeting in Singapore with a clear vision that together, we could make rapid progress.”
Simson Demmer, Chief Strategy Officer of CargoLogicManagement
Less than twelve weeks later, the capacities of both AirBridgeCargo and CargoLogicAir are now available for digital booking in Europe on cargo.one.
“There is an “aha” moment when you see a search complete on cargo.one for the first time. It is simple, clean and intuitive. A very strong customer journey from search to booking, and therefore a channel where we want to be present for our customers.”
Simson Demmer continues
Freight forwarders, who can register and use cargo.one free of charge, are enabled to simply search for, compare and book the airlines’ vast freighter capacities, with the click of a button and instant confirmation.
Read how AirBridgeCargo and CargoLogicAir managed to complete the technical and business integration with cargo.one - from the announcement to the first cargo.one shipment taking off in no less than twelve weeks!
The integration phase
Turning words into action - with a "can-do" mindset
Digitalization is both a technical and organizational challenge. To achieve transformative results in a short amount of time, people with the right expertise and mindset need to come together and work jointly, hand in hand. For AirBridgeCargo and CargoLogicAir the ambitious goal was to display digital leadership while leveraging existing structures - within only a few weeks. Therefore a small project team of 5 people that were passionate about the project was set up to work alongside the cargo.one team to handle the day-to-day integration activities. To minimize the efforts on the airline side, the cargo.one team offered a variety of integration methods, that it had successfully integrated with multiple established airline infrastructures in the past.
Demmer explains:
“We have been making concerted efforts in building our data and analytics capabilities and integrating these with our commercial and operational processes to deliver a better product. Together with cargo.one, we were able to build on this foundation. We had to speed up in some areas, given the pace of the project. But there was a tremendous amount of flexibility and constructive engagement on both sides to match our timeline, and that made integration almost a breeze.”
After an initial kick-off workshop with both airlines, all data requirements, the systems that a potential solution would touch, constraints and workarounds were analyzed and gathered. From then on, two-week sprints with continuous deployments were established to ensure that both teams were able to react quickly to new requirements and developments. Furthermore, weekly alignment calls took place to align on activities, track and review progress as well as to define objectives for the following week.
Mike Rötgers, Chief Technology Officer of cargo.one summarizes,
“We worked fully agile in two-week development cycles and with continuous deployments. We utilized modern communication channels to create alignment and to enable exchange between the teams. Project teams from both sides participated with a “can-do” mindset, thinking about how to enable things, rather than thinking about what things would not work.”
Twelve weeks later, the integration of both AirBridgeCargo and CargoLogicAir capacities onto the cargo.one platform was finalized. Offers that consist of a routing, an applicable rate, handling times and which are based on available capacity for each specific request, are searchable, bookable and cancellable on cargo.one.
“We work closely with many of our forwarding customers to establish needs and wants and to drive our customer-centric product forward. We are excited to now offer new and even larger freighter capacities to our customer base, fulfilling one major request of many of our customers.”
says Oliver T. Neumann, co-founder of cargo.one
Key success factors for the partnership:
- Outspoken commitment from top management
- Willingness to work with available means and a “can-do” mindset
- Agile approach: design, develop, review and iterate
- Continuous development and deployment in two-week cycles
- Weekly planning and review calls with relevant stakeholders
The first booking
Striving to give customers the best possible booking experience.
After only twelve weeks of integration and the successful completion of final user acceptance tests, AirBridgeCargo and CargoLogicAir were ready to accept bookings placed on cargo.one and to deliver to customers a new outstanding digital booking experience.
"As AirBridgeCargo we want to offer our customers the most convenient way to book air cargo. This also means offering different channels to book our capacity, so they have a free choice. cargo.one helps us to be where the customer wants to be and to deliver even better customer service. I’m excited about this new opportunity and look forward to seeing this partnership develop.”
Jonathan Celetaria, Sales Director Europe at AirBridgeCargo says.
Alper Dogan and Jan Riksen, working in the airfreight export department of Agility in Frankfurt, Germany, and both users who are fond of the cargo.one platform, regularly book AirBridgeCargo and CargoLogicAir capacities to destinations worldwide. Both were invited to make the first actual AirBridgeCargo booking on cargo.one.
Jan Riksen:
“I am very happy to now be able to see AirBridgeCargo’s offering when looking to book a shipment on cargo.one. The cargo.one platform makes it easy for me to access AirBridge’s large freighter capacities, to see all applicable rates and to make the booking with a click of a button and with instant confirmation. This helps me to not only find the best offers for my customers but also to save valuable time in the process.”
Alper Dogan explains the booking process and what he appreciates about searching for offers on cargo.one:
“I quickly enter the shipment details on cargo.one’s input page and a few seconds later offers of several airlines with applicable rates appear. The great thing is, that all offers that are being displayed have available capacity for my shipment and the rate is bookable.”
He continues,
“After a quick comparison of offers, we chose to book our 3008 kg shipments onto an offer with flight P3412 connecting in SVO onto flight RU697 with destination PVG. By entering an existing AirBridgeCargo air way bill and clicking the “book now” button, the booking was placed, confirmed and added to the cargo.one tracking hub, where we can follow the shipment status until delivery in PVG.”
"Looking at the cargo.one tracking hub now, we can see that the shipment has been received at the airport in FRA and is waiting to be loaded today, on P3412, departing for SVO tomorrow,"
adds Jan Riksen.
On September 11, 2019, a mere 13 weeks after integration start, the AirBridgeCargo, CargoLogicAir and cargo.one team were able to celebrate the first loading of cargo onto the planes at FRA airport. Booked via cargo.one, delivered by AirBridgeCargo and CargoLogicAir.
