Cathay Pacific targets digital cargo with One Record trial in Hong Kong

A trial of IATA One Record initiative was carried out by companies at Hong Kong International, including Cathay Pacific, as part of efforts to move to paperless processes in air cargo.

The pilot, which ran in Hong Kong in March, was a joint initiative between Cathay Pacific Cargo and the Airport Authority Hong Kong (AAHK) and enabled stakeholders to view shipment data over a two-day period.

The trial followed shipments from freight forwarders, which could be monitored by all parties during the pilot.

The participating freight forwarders included Sinotrans (HK) Air Transportation Development Co Ltd, Soonest Express (HK) Co Ltd and DHL, which all used a platform developed by Global Logistics System HK (GLS).

It is the third pilot of IATA’s One Record project that Cathay Pacific has taken part in as it also joined trials in Amsterdam and London Heathrow.

The initiative enables end-to-end transparency of consignments as they pass through the supply chain as companies connect their systems centrally using IATA’s protocols for APIs – the interface that enables users to connect to the system.

GLS chief executive Simon Ng said: “We are aiming at enabling data exchange between forwarders and Cathay Pacific based on the One Record standard over a web-based API by the third quarter of this year. This is a first step towards our ultimate vision in migrating all of our airline and forwarder customers to the One Record standard.”

IATA head of digital cargo Henk Mulder said: “The ultimate aim of the ONE Record programme is to enable a data-led digitisation of the global supply chain in order to improve service, speed and reliability, through the standardisation of competing or overlapping systems of the different stakeholders in the air cargo industry into one of shared intelligence and cooperation.”

Following the success of this pilot, the airline’s next objective is to introduce One Record across its global operations.