CHAMP Cargosystems, the world’s only IT company solely dedicated to air cargo, has joined the IATA e-freight initiative. The initiative, which could deliver projected savings of $1.2 billion annually, is designed to eliminate the need to produce and transport paper documents for air cargo shipments by moving to a simpler industry-wide paper-free environment.

Short term, the aim is to replace air carriage paper documents with electronic documents, using electronic data to eliminate the hundreds of millions of paper air waybills and house waybills produced each year. As the project develops, certified and verified digital documents will replace other shipping documents such as letters of instruction, packing lists, invoices, certificates. These can be printed when required for regulatory purposes by national authorities.

John Johnston, CHAMP Cargosystems’ CEO, said, "CHAMP Cargosystems is ideally positioned to support the IATA initiative with its prime focus on providing automation solutions to the industry. By establishing standards and developing automated solutions for the full supply chain, and driving process improvements within the customer base, CHAMP will help the industry prepare for countries’ adoption of ‘paperless’ cargo." While the greatest gains rely on legislative change, the industry will benefit immediately from better, quicker exchanges of electronic data. IATA’s e-freight Message Improvement Programme will increase data quality, timeliness and consistency, reducing data duplication, redundant data capture, and error-prone manual re-keying. Even without the longer-term gains of automated customs reporting, this will improve carriers’ and forwarders’ business processes.

The vision for e-freight is the paperless delivery of goods from shipper to consignee. For this to succeed, the different national authorities involved will need to accept a digital representation of current paper certificates, documents and manifests. Several countries - including Canada, India and the USA - already require electronic reporting of cargo inventories pre-arrival, though each has a slightly different set of data or protocols to be included in the report.

In an attempt to simplify the reporting requirements, the e-freight initiative now includes the World Customs Organisation (WCO) as one of its participants. While this process continues, CHAMP Cargosystems has implemented a Global Customs Gateway, designed to remove the complexity of redesigning a solution for each national authority as new requirements for automated pre-reporting emerge.

As an IATA Strategic Partner in the e-freight initiative, CHAMP Cargosystems will continue to provide the full service solutions expected by its customers, both now and in the future.