What is a Cargo Community System?

A Cargo Community System (CCS) is a digital platform that connects stakeholders in the air cargo supply chain, such as ground handlers, freight forwarders, trucking companies, carriers, and airport authorities to facilitate data exchange and streamline operations, improving efficiency, predictability, and visibility.

The evolution of Cargo Community Systems: From Messaging Hubs to Digital Ecosystems

Initially, Cargo Community Systems facilitated basic electronic messaging between parties lacking advanced IT systems. In less technologically advanced cargo hubs, a CCS will still play this role, ensuring essential communication. As the industry evolved, so did CCS. With many companies investing in optimizing their internal systems and processes, a modern CCS now focuses on driving operational improvements and insights in cross-company processes, such as landside operations. Offering real-time visibility, automated workflows, and integration with stakeholders' internal systems, it facilitates alignment of capacity and demand and the associated work and enables continuous improvements.  

Benefits of Next-Generation CCS: Enhancing Operational Efficiency and Enabling Data-Driven Optimization

As Cargo Community Systems have transitioned from simple messaging platforms to comprehensive digital ecosystems that enhance collaboration, efficiency, and transparency, they offer a whole new set of benefits:

• Landside Operations Optimization: Features like truck slot booking, access control, and yard flow management improve turnaround times, optimize usage of resources (e.g. staff, trucks, warehouse and parking space), improve predictability of service, and reduce congestion.
• From Data Integration to Process Integration:
  Self-service provisioning, central sharing and validation of documents, and real-time status updates on freight and booking status ensure smooth process execution. With information validated and capacity ensured, cargo and truck turnaround are accelerated, allowing for optimal usage of available resources.
• Increasing Operational Agility: Real-time data sharing and visibility also enable stakeholders to quickly understand the impact of, respond to, and recover from operational disruptions that occur frequently.
• Data-Driven Decision Making: By aggregating such data across the cargo pick-up and delivery process, CCS provides actionable insights, helping stakeholders anticipate issues, optimize operations, and analyze and demonstrate performance.
• Leveraging Investments in Internal Systems: Modern CCS are designed to integrate with existing IT infrastructures, such as CMS, WMS, TMS, access control/ANPR systems, ... Enabling digital transformation without overhauling current systems lowers hurdles for adoption and ensures access to best-of-breed components for each step in the chain. It also enables end-to-end optimization, for example, granting access to a yard only when a dock door has been scheduled for pickup or delivery within the same timeframe.

Examples of Modern Cargo Community Systems

Airport hubs worldwide have implemented Cargo Community Systems. Examples of successful implementations include, amongst others, Brussels Airport (BRUcloud), Changi Airport, Frankfurt Airport, Schiphol, and Dallas-Fort Worth.

The Future of Cargo Community Systems

Modern Cargo Community Systems (CCS) will increasingly boost operational predictability and reliability. As more historical data becomes available and AI is applied, cargo stakeholders will gain deeper insights, spot trends earlier, and better anticipate risks.

Today, CCS mainly optimize cross-company processes within a single airport hub. As adoption grows across more hubs, the next level of optimization will come from interconnecting these hubs - enabling end-to-end visibility, better coordination, and smarter operational decisions across the network.