21 Jun 2004, Cargo News Asia
By IAN PUTZGER.
MASkargo, the freight arm of Malaysian Airlines, is pushing hard to deal with freight forwarders and shippers electronically. In May, electronic booking became mandatory in its home market, after some months of tests, where e-bookings were given priority to encourage a shift away from making shipment arrangements over fax or phone.
"Since May 15, we do not entertain anything other than e-booking," declared J.J. Ong, senior general manager of cargo.
MASkargo had been working toward that end for the past 12 months, since it first introduced an e-booking mechanism. To induce forwarders to shift their booking from phone and fax to the carrier's web site, it pledged to respond to e-bookings within 20 minutes, whereas companies that booked manually would not get a reply until the next day. According to Ong, by late April, 92-93 percent of the carrier's bookings came in electronically.
Walter Culas, chairman of the Airfreight Forwarders Association of Malaysia, said the e-bookings went fine, as long as point-to-point routings were used. Reservations for shipments that would be transferred enroute to an interline partner actually took longer to confirm electronically than by the manual process.
Those e-bookings go straight into the MASkargo site. "Forwarders and shippers have direct links to us, so there's no need to use a portal," Ong said. Outside Malaysia, the carrier has used the Ezycargo portal in some markets. Ong said it may improve load factors in markets like Hong Kong or Taiwan.
He is now aiming to introduce an electronic payment system. To that end, MASkargo has teamed up with Deutsche Bank. It also gained the endorsement of Malaysia's central bank and got three other banks to participate in the project. Tests have already commenced in Penang and were expected to start in June in Kuala Lumpur.
Subsequently, the whole of Malaysia will come on board, Ong said. "Before the end of the year, we intend to make all payments electronic," he declared.
Culas said the forwarders organisation has accepted the project in principle, but it needs to see how it actually works and what flaws may emerge. The association has agreed to a three-month trial period to assess the system.
Culas is firm on one thing: payment disputes will have to be settled before payments are made. "We won't agree to pay up front and then get a refund. That would be too much administrative work. This system should be user-friendly," he insisted.
Ong is intent on creating further momentum for electronic processing. MASkargo has been leaning on the Malaysian government to ratify the Montreal Protocol Four. This framework, which replaces the old Warsaw Convention that governs international aviation, opens the door to paperless trading and an electronic air waybill.
"At one point the government was concerned that forwarders were not ready. Now we think we're ready for that," Ong said.
He is also interested in RFID (radio frequency identification) technology. "We're exploring RFID for ULD (unit load devices) movements," he said.
Beyond container tracking, Ong also sees potential benefits in additional functions for value-added services. "We could try to put thermometers into the chips so they trigger off an alert if the temperature in the container gets too high," he said.
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