“Our mission is to take the paper out of cargo by the end of 2010. The air cargo business is drowning in paper. Every cargo shipment travels with up to 38 documents. Each year we could fill 39 747-freighters with the paper wasted on this documentation,” laments Giovanni Bisignani, director general and CEO of the International Air Transport Association (IATA).
But the industry group’s new e-freight program—one component of IATA’s Simplifying the Business initiative—promises to save $1.2 billion annually and reduce shipping time by as much as 25 percent.
The e-freight program will be introduced in two phases. Early adopters will be totally paperless by the end of 2007, while about 95 percent of the industry is expected to be paper-free by the end of 2010.
Beyond that, “the vision is to completely eliminate all paper across the full multi-modal supply chain,” says Bisignani.
