12 Mar How a Truck Slot Management application can help overcome truck congestion?
Truck congestion is a big problem behind the scenes at some major US airports, especially in North America, because of the existing inefficiencies present as a result of poor coordination and infrastructure. North America faces the major challenge of truck congestion since most of the counties here have more than 60% of truck drivers.
Truck congestion at cargo complexes in airports is a global issue and it is expected to increase as the demand for air cargo increases. Pre-arrival information, advanced planning, and collaboration are possible applications to ease these complexities, but these are just not enough.
Truck Slot Management and Airport Cargo Community System
The world is in dire need of truck slot management and airport cargo community systems, which is why many such systems are making their way into the market. They are artificial intelligence-based tools that allow ground handlers, freight forwarders, and trucking companies to better coordinate their landside freight management.
It eventually helps them reduce waiting times and smoothen peaks and idle times. It will also allow the ground handlers to make slots available in line with their capacity in addition to offering an overview of bookings. Drivers will be able to use mobile apps for check-in and check-out. This truck slot management system/cargo community system will help the airports significantly enhance their throughput with the existing infrastructure.
Benefits of the Truck Slot Management Application
Currently, truckers have to wait in line for hours to pick up and drop off cargo at Airports in North America. Delays can be costly especially when air freight customers have already paid for the premium expedited service. There might be little traffic at international passenger terminals, but at some airports, there is so much cargo that businesses have to wait for several days before they get medical supplies and other imports that arrive through planes.
Another factor that delays the process and affects its efficiency, even more, is manual intervention and document processing. Data entry at various stages can take approximately 22 hours per shipment. In the absence of proactive information to the cargo terminal operators, there can be inefficient personnel and asset planning at the gates, peaks and idle times, and long waiting times for freight handlers or trucking companies.
Read More on how a Cargo Community System can transform an entire airport cargo ecosystem
Here is how the truck slot management application/cargo community system can help solve these problems:
- A truck slot management application allows all the stakeholders involved in the process to coordinate freight handling processes through an online slot booking application.
- This application can easily streamline the truck flow from and to the airport.
- By using truck slot management, all slots and their statuses i.e., whether it’s available or reserved, can be represented in an intuitive calendar with day, week, and month views.
- It also allows the ground handlers to mark the availability of the slots available in line with their capacity.
- Handlers can get a clear overview of information about all bookings and can receive it proactively. It helps them organise personnel and assets at the gate accordingly.
Conclusion
With the adoption of emerging technologies like AI, digitally-driven cargo environments are now becoming a reality. The emergence of blockchains, advanced analytics, and artificial intelligence offers a great opportunity for the creation and development of transformational freight community platforms/cargo community systems.
Platforms like Cargo Community Systems are the key to driving efficiencies through improved data insights and lowered operating costs along with a wider customer base that offers streamlined operations. Since technologies like air freight software are the future, you must harness a broad range of technological tools to build an online freight marketplace.