28 Mar Ensuring Business Continuity and Trade Facilitation during COVID-19 Pandemic
COVID-19 or Coronavirus has brought the world down quite terribly in all ways possible. Initially, it was thought to be only China, but now the world’s most populous country is gradually recovering. As the time went, all developing as well as developed nations are getting terribly affected. Now Italy followed by Spain, Iran and most importantly, USA has become the new epicentres.
As a result of this ongoing pandemic, business operations across industries have taken a backseat. Of all, logistics is the worst hit as several flights and ships carrying cargo are called off. While we all believe there is a scope for revival, the daily death rates are soaring high exponentially. It is a well known fact that all organizations globally have insisted on Work from Home for all their employees until further notice.
But this is actually an opportunity to be leveraged rather than looking at it as a challenge. There is not physical presence of your staff, yet your business is running. This will also mean a chance to digitize cargo operations and completely overcome all problems as the time goes. All resources will be used to working remotely and efficiently. Not only that, one gets to unleash a lot more than that. Here are some of the perks a cargo stakeholder can achieve by digitizing operations now.
Staying ahead of competition
In a labour intensive industry like logistics, the scope for digitization is more. But due to lack of awareness or a non-tech savvy crowd, digitization is taking a long time to grow. But the ones embracing them will actually grow business multi-fold and will give a competitive edge for you to stay relevant in the business.
Reduced risk
With the ongoing pandemic, community spread is becoming rampant in several countries worldwide. With the lack of anti-viral medicines and vaccines to stay immune to the virus, the best way to prevent it is self-isolation or social distancing. With digitization, the number of resources at work comes down to almost 0 to 1. Therefore, there is a reduced risk of further community spread.
Paperless trade
The ultimate goal of digitization is reducing the number of manual documents involved. When the air cargo community system was set at the Mumbai International Airport, the number of paper documents involved were 124. But post the implementation of this community system, the number of paper documents came down to 24. Likewise, at this scenario the number of documents can come down drastically to zero.
Reduced data entry costs
Manual intervention will mean an extra expenditure on data entry. Anyhow, this can be overcome with digitization. Yes, manual data entry works can be performed online with robotic process automation. There are several manual data entry works like that in the logistics industry. Implementing digitization for trade facilitation at this juncture will add enormous value in terms of cost cutting as well as proper resource utilisation.
Overall, having a robust cargo community system or an air cargo management system will help in achieving relevant business synergies. Apart from all this, obtaining an e-airway bill might sound like a challenge. But the same can be overcome with the availability of a futuristic business solution that throws light on this specific issue.
Experts say, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) powered digitization will ensure maximum positive impact on the bottom-line of the air cargo and ocean cargo stakeholders. A month ago, Kale analysed the impact of Coronavirus Pandemic on the logistics industry which is visibly taking place now. We urge you to read the same and share your comments.