Some people like to say “less is more.”
     But a couple of years ago when I started writing about Kale Logistics Solutions we were privileged to get to know, albeit from a distance, Amar More, CEO of the company and a main driver in dreaming up a better way to move cargo via the Kale Airport Cargo Community System.
     Amar, we have learned from our interactions and his writings, is fiercely smart.
     But we have also observed he is quite a lovely, soft-spoken, kind, considerate and loyal individual who cherishes family and life and is a very reliable business colleague.
     What we publish now is a unique dialogue with Amar More, whom we know to be an expert and a consummate businessman.
     The level of the material we are presenting and the answers Amar contributed will surely capture the attention of the best-informed readers.
     Although Amar’s last name is pronounced in English with the “e” as a long “a”, we think that the idiom “less is more” when talking to Amar is overtaken by clear innovative inventive thinking:
     More is more!

Keyword:  Takeaway
What would you like shippers and logistics providers to know about Kale Logistics in a paragraph or two of take away from the Miami air cargo event this week.
     Kale Logistics has a vision to facilitate the global trade through technology. We have created next generation technology platforms that facilitate digital interactions between different stakeholders of the value chain to improve efficiency (by increasing the speed of cargo movement), to improve sustainability (by reducing carbon emissions and paper requirements), to improve visibility (by providing a single window for tracking shipments) and to make supply chains more secure (by advance exchange of data).
Our platforms are live and vibrant creating communities around the airports, ports and inland ports across the world. We are digitizing 150+ airports and ports across 40+ countries today trying to implement the best practices and learnings from this global experience into our products which can immensely benefit our customers.

Keyword:  Cooperation vs. Competition
Considering that your global experience is quite unique, what is your view on how the cargo airlines and their freight forwarder partners’ role has changed in today’s world?
     Excellent question. Everything about our business in about collaboration. I mean we are facilitating digital collaboration but the whole logistics industry is all about collaboration. If forwarders and airlines don’t collaborate (co-operate) with each other, they will never ever be able to deliver the goods on time. I am so happy to see that a lot of things have changed in today’s world for the supply chain partners. Initiatives such as e-AWB were once believed to have skewed benefits across the stakeholders but now we see significant progress in the adoption of such digitization initiatives. Online booking portals once considered as a taboo in the air freight industry are slowly capturing the markets. More and more airlines systems are getting connected to the forwarder systems using APIs. So in spite of different and sometimes, conflicting objectives, the community has realized the need for better co-operation/collaboration to serve the end customers – BCOs. And we at Kale are happy to be at the centre of facilitating this collaboration through our technology platforms.

Keyword:  Dealing With Obstacles.
Please name three great challenges in your daily business and how you handle them? Was finding solutions in this regard also counting as a learning curve and how?
     My most spontaneous answer to your question is 3 challenges are Mindset, Mindset and Mindset . Everything starts there. The tools, the technologies, the solutions are not rocket science and these are all there to be taken but the important thing is the mindset to change. If one steps out of the daily grind and looks at what they do everyday; one can come up with at least 2-3 new ideas to make the work more efficient and in our industry more sustainable (i.e. identify the copies of paper one doesn’t need to print to move a shipment) and more transparent fashion.
     The mindset change is effectuated by good leadership and openness of the team to accept ideas that lead to a better future. From our side, this requires a continual market education. We are trying to change the industry and the way it handles/moves shipment forever and for better and the change has to be ushered in, in a way that will be easy to absorb by the industry. So breaking the task into small; achievable targets; conducting proof of concepts to engender confidence in the users; educating the leadership on the salutary benefits of the change/digitization are some of the steps we are taking. Finally, the change has to be driven by a neutral entity so that it is not being looked at suspiciously by the rest; and here we believe the airports and ports should be leading these changes as they are neutral and dominant players in the supply chain and have everything to benefit from the effects of digitization viz. job creation, sustainability, efficiency.

Keyword:  Dealing With Failures
Kale Logistics has a reputation as hands-on problem solvers. Please name a couple of major practical problems that Kale has solved or at least lessened for clients.
     Absolutely. I always love to quote the example of one of the largest cargo airports in south Asia that we have worked with who had a problem of processing more cargo in the same available space. Only way this could be done if we increased the velocity of cargo movement which in turn increases throughput of the existing facility. We studied the factors that were slowing down the velocity, like trucks arriving at the airports in bunches, paperwork making the truck and cargo wait, handlers not knowing how much cargo was coming exactly when and trucks not having cargo ready for delivery clogging the queues. We created the platform where paperwork could be done in advance of trucks coming to the airport through our cloud-based platforms and trucks came by appointment. This indeed increased the throughput of the facility by 225% which means the facility could process almost thrice the amount of cargo in the same space. We received global recognition for this work.
     Another one of my favorites is reducing the container dwell time at a maritime port by 75% and reducing the time for exporters to receive the tax refunds from 6 months to 3 days by creating a community platform that allowed accurate exchange of information between the tax authorities and the logistics movements and milestones.

Keyword:  Brave New World
Can you go out on a limb and identify by challenge something you would like to see changed in how the air cargo business is conducted?
     I think for me the industry recognizes the benefits of digitization but each is looking at the other’s face to start the change. I would say that in our industry the airports need to play a more active role in changing the status quo in cargo and getting the community together on the journey of a digital future.

Keyword:  Competition
Why ship Via Kale Logistic empowerment program? What are the advantages?
     First and foremost a proven track record for changing the status quo in the industry and this is not reflected just in the awards we received for our work at neutral industry forums like the United Nations but also by major universities covering our work as pathbreaking and leading in improving the status of the industry. Just the sheer breadth of digitization use cases that we have developed in our community platforms / trade facilitation platforms sets us apart. Our platforms have features for the exporters, importers, forwarders, customs brokers, truckers, airlines, airports, handlers, customs, OGAs / PGAs, security agencies etc. this is more comprehensive than anything else. The customer base of 150+ airports, ports and handlers across 40+ countries in facilitating trade speaks about the benefits our platform continue to deliver.
     I will classify benefits into efficiency (increasing speed and throughput of cargo facilities); alleviating congestion, reducing paperwork thereby cutting less trees and reducing carbon emissions by reducing the wait times for trucks, enabling better planning through advanced shipment information to the next stakeholder in the value chain; enabling better and reliable visibility thereby reducing inventory costs, giving the airports the ability to attract more cargo thereby creating more jobs in the eco-system and finally giving more resiliency to supply chains to handle pandemic or war situations better.

Keyword:  Learning From Adversities
Has the pandemic experience had a lasting influence on the way your business is handled?
     We had an immense positive influence thanks to the pandemic. Pandemic necessitated 3 things for the industry viz. ability to work from anywhere, reduce the medium of transmission of virus viz. paper and have social distancing viz. decongest airport/port facilities. We incorporated most features in our platform to address the above and make our customers more resilient to tackle pandemic-like situations.
     For our internal work, we figured out that a lot can be get done remotely. We had a record number of orders during the pandemic and we executed most of those remotely. This gave us the confidence that we can get work done remotely and that opened a new vista for us to hire talent globally as well as from remote places. In fact, to contribute to the society we hired a lot of talent from tier 2, tier 3 cities which created job opportunities in these places.

Keyword:  Bigger And Bigger Data?
What is your view of advanced analytics as leveraging data techniques like machine learning (AI), deep learning (as a subset of machine learning), and does agile software development emerge increasingly important in your work?
     Absolutely. I will first address the question on agile development. It is the only way for us to move forward. We have re-aligned our organization to the agile software development methodology and we already see the results of the same.
     On Machine Learning and AI it is absolutely important not just to us, but for our customers as well. So today in our truck traffic management module we have the components of AI; our pioneering .pdf to EDI service has machine learning technology for intelligent data capture. We are doing AI-based chatbots for our customers as well as our internal stakeholders. As Kale we have an internal AI portal called KAITE that our internal teams use across functions such as development, legal, HR, Sales etc.
     We firmly believe Machine Learning and AI will have a significant impact on our future as well as on our customers’ future as well.
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