Cargo bookings are an important area to digitally transform air cargo services so people can spend less time doing menial tasks with the potential for errors or missing key business opportunities, and spending more time doing valuable tasks.
Awery Aviation Software has introduced its CargoBooking product in South Africa, which has been embraced by freight forwarders and GSAs.
Anna Balan, Head of CargoBooking says over 1,000 quotes were created on CargoBooking, both by forwarders who have access or GSAs who processed email requests using its AI tool, eMagic.
This resulted in over 800 bookings with more than 70% being created by the forwarders.
What makes CargoBooking different is its ability to process a wide range of commodities and not just general cargo.
Chief Commercial Officer, Tristan Koch, says, “General cargo in South Africa is only 50-60% of the market. Perishables, hunting trophies, live animals and dangerous goods are significant industry verticals and we are the only people who can offer a digital booking and quotation solution for those products.”
Outside of South Africa, individual airlines and GSAs are using CargoBooking so the plan for this year is to roll it out into other countries where there is the demand.
Koch highlights Kenya for its perishables business and electronics and clothing in North Africa.
A team attended the air cargo Africa conference in Nairobi to make connections.
A key insight from South Africa is to give people time to embrace new tools, with Koch saying, “We spent time collectively collaborating with industry players in the region to bring the appropriate technology to aid efficiency.”
Balan gave a presentation to the South African Air Freight Forwarders Association and Awery did marketing with individual airlines and GSAs.
Once they were confident CargoBooking worked, they loved the speed and accuracy of the service, and the ability to make bookings at any time.
Managing the transition
Companies in Africa and other parts of the world are sometimes reluctant to give Awery direct access to their cargo management systems due to concerns around leaking commercial information or cybersecurity, so the team have to convince head offices that Awery’s services are safe and secure.
Sometimes companies want to monetise connections between the platform and airlines, which Awery is opposed to, as CargoBooking is an open access environment, facilitating data sharing across the industry.
Koch has noted much more open dialogue with airlines and GSAs in recent months as they realise Awery is a safe partner.
They are realising data sharing can improve the industry as one source of truth stops different entities adding errors to the data, with Koch commenting, “When data is accurate from the start, everyone in the supply chain benefits.”
When creating quotes, the eMagic tool with in-built AI will take the information and turn it into a structured format in one click then present flight options and prices, which can be sent back to the customer in seconds.
ChatGPT has been integrated into eMagic as an extra layer to improve accuracy in a system which was already very accurate.
Balan said, “This tool is learning from each sample. When we show it another format, once it has processed the information it is easy for the tool to insert the information into form so next time it will be read and recognised easily.”
The old system was good at recognising structured information but struggled with free form text such as a user writing ‘the second week of a month’, whereas ChatGPT understands what this means and fills it in accurately.
It can also understand context better with Koch giving the real-life example of the old system being confused by the letters ‘PER’ because it did not know if this meant transporting perishables or the destination was Perth Airport.
The operator still needs to double-check whether the system understood information properly.
Efficient operations
Reliable air cargo services are a great help to economic development.
Balan shared feedback from a GSA who reported 30% growth in small shipments because they could take out-of-hours bookings.
Koch added that the rich data means flights can be optimised so payloads can be utilised better.
Wastage is removed from the system because operations are not caused by bad information such as being given the wrong dimensions.
Koch says, “Something like 1 in 10 shipments has a billing query because of mistyped information or there is a disagreement. You could reassign the claims team where they can do something more productive because there are not any billing queries. It takes wastage out of the system and optimises services.”
This article was published in the March/April 2025 issue of Air Logistics International, click here to read the digital edition and click here to subscribe.