FT:   There is much talk, and there has been for a number of years, about greening our transport offer. On the ground we almost see the opposite. There is some remarkable opposition to legislative measures in this direction. In many areas of the world there is almost a feeling of resignation that nothing can be done. From your point of view, you stated in more than one occasion that digitisation can actually afford significant progress in providing services that are more compliant with sustainability. Considering your approach, would you be able to provide some examples where good business practice goes hand in hand with sustainability performance indicators?
AM:   The benefits pertaining to sustainability are enormous when it comes to digitisation and more specifically digitisation through the airport and port community systems. Just imagine the fact that today, in spite of individual stakeholder’s automation, we still have around 124 copies of paper (across 30 types of documents) getting generated in moving an international air freight system and an estimated 200+ copies of paper getting generated in moving an international ocean cargo shipment. Our study indicates that about 25% of the copies of paper may be required by law, but there is a tremendous potential to eliminate or drastically reduce the remaining 75% copies of paper and that is roughly 80 odd copies per shipment. With an airport or port single window infrastructure, where the data is shared digitally, the non-regulatory copies of paper can be replaced either with digital data or electronic dockets. If you take an airport with 1 Mn tons of cargo, then we are talking roughly about 1.4 Mn shipments annually. The potential to save the copies of paper is roughly 112 Mn copies of paper on an annual basis, which in turn could be equivalent to saving 11,200 trees on an annual basis. As grandiose as it may sound, if through digitisation we are able to achieve even a fraction of the above potential we would be contributing to the environment a great deal.
     Another example is an idling truck typically burns 0.6 gallons/hour, there are thousands of trucks plying to the airports and ports having a wait and dwell time, in some cases, in excess of 4-5 hours. The typical CO2 emissions are 10,000 grams/gallon. Now, if we can cut down a couple of hours from the overall processing time of trucks through digitisation and the community systems, you are talking about billions of grams of CO2 being saved on an annual basis per airport and port.
     These are common-sense, low hanging fruits of digitisation which can be reaped by creating digital cargo communities. Our pilot behind 300 trucks at the Atlanta airport showed we could save 9 Mn grams of CO2. We have developed a simple savings calculator that can tell an airport or port how much the community can save in terms of environmental and economic costs by deploying community level automation.
     Having had consideration for environmental improvements, Kale Logistics’s President told us more about his business objectives: “I would just like to state that building digital cargo communities around airports, ports is going to take the industry to a more efficient, secure and sustainable future. Not just that, but the global industry bodies like the United Nations CEFACT has also given a recommendation (recommendation 33) that talks about the path to trade facilitation through community systems; the International Maritime Organization has already taken a step by recommending the mandate of Maritime Single Window system. Even the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) through the Annexure 9 on Facilitation recommends the implementation cargo community systems to create a trade facilitation infrastructure. The term community systems had been abused in the past with point to point EDI also being referred to as a community system. A true community system is nothing but a commercial airport or port single window system wherein the stakeholders get a digital infrastructure in terms of a single window to exchange data with the other stakeholders of the supply chain. The TIME IS NOW!”
     Listening to our friend Amar More we felt the same sense of expectation we had more than 25 years ago at an IATA meeting held in Vancouver. The air cargo world was opening to our incredulous eyes as a colossal heap of opportunities, all within reach. The only thing to do was agreeing on common standards for data exchange and the world of air logistics could become fully interconnected and, perhaps, automated. The other transport modes would follow suit and we thought the world of international trade was going to be changed for good before the end of the millennium. Soon everything would be available everywhere for everybody, those were our imaginings.
     Well, we have lived a curious experience in the last 25 years or more. Rather that pushing toward innovation and automation to expand the horizon of global trade, enhancing our life standards at the same speed, we have taken a big plunge into the inner human soul, magnified the stimuli of our inner selves and shrank the perspective of our dreams from the exploration of space to the magic of shopping without moving a step form our screens. Needless to say that nothing of what we had imagined as progress actually happened and what truly happened was making everything much easier and more complicated at the same time, too much of anything that has no value for Us at all. We went from “2001, a space odyssey” to the “Inception” and, with much resistance, we had to restrain our hopes.
     From other points of view, it is perhaps good that we did not manage to change the world and make it more interconnected through the standards of the past.      Ralph Waldo Emerson is credited to have coined this expression: “Life is a journey, not a destination.” Well, kudos to all those who, wittingly or unwittingly, managed make this journey almost eternal . . . Maybe Amar is the right captain to take us and air cargo logistics to its destination.
     Thank you, Amar More and Kale Logistics for taking this challenge without hesitation and proceeding in this fascinating journey, we'll keep our fingers crossed.
Marco Sorgetti/Tirthankar Ghosh