News / Air Canada Cargo's four-year journey to a new management system 

From left: Matthieu Casey, Air Canada Cargo; Manuel Galindo, CHAMP; ACC's Janet Wallace; Nicholas Xenocostas, CHAMP

Air Canada Cargo’s decision to replace its cargo management system may have been announced this week, but comments made during a press briefing suggest the project has been years in the making. 

The carrier revealed it had selected CHAMP Cargosystems’ Cargospot neo platform to manage operations, commercial functions, and revenue accounting across its global cargo business, following a very lengthy evaluation and approval process. 

Speaking after the announcement at TIACA’s executive summit, Air Canada Cargo MD cargo operations & transformation Janet Wallace offered a rare glimpse into the realities of securing major technology investment within an airline. 

“When you’re in a passenger airline and you’re raising funding, it’s very hard,” she said, describing part of the challenge behind the project. 

Air Canada Cargo’s journey began several years ago. During the briefing, it was noted there had been “a lot of change in CHAMP’s product over four years”. 

According to Ms Wallace, the airline initially went to market to assess available systems, but was not immediately convinced by any one provider. 

“When we first went to market to have a look at what was going on, we weren’t really sure whether one was better than the other,” she said. “But when we went back to them a couple of times, we’re kind of like, ‘wow, this is moving forward’.” 

That evolution was also highlighted by CHAMP chief commercial officer Nicholas Xenocostas, who noted that Air Canada had been able to see significant progress between demonstrations. 

“What we showed you at the beginning, to what we showed you 12 months later, you could see that actually there’s tremendous work done,” he said. 

The project goes well beyond a traditional cargo management system replacement. Air Canada Cargo will implement Cargospot neo Airline, neo Handling, neo Revenue Accounting and Cargospot Mobile, alongside CHAMP’s customs and messaging capabilities, creating what executives described as a single platform spanning commercial, operational and financial processes. 

For Air Canada Cargo, one attraction was the ability to eliminate paper-based workflows. 

Ms Wallace pointed to CHAMP’s mobile-first strategy, noting that the airline still manages large volumes of paper documentation, including air waybills, security forms and operational checklists. 

“We need to get the paper out of the operation,” she said.

Implementation is already under way. Executives said months of detailed planning had taken place, involving multiple stakeholders across operations, sales, ground handling and other business units. 

Both Air Canada and CHAMP executives acknowledged that change management would be one of the biggest challenges ahead, particularly for an organisation that has relied on the same systems and processes for many years. 

“They have a system that’s been there a very long time,” said one executive. “People have been doing things the same way for a very, very long time. They think this is the only way to do it.” 

The deal also represents an important milestone in CHAMP’s own transformation. 

Since the arrival in January of chief executive Manuel Galindo, founder of digital air cargo booking platform WebCargo, the company looks set to continue and accelerate the modernisation of both its technology stack and its market perception. 

For years, CHAMP has been viewed as one of air cargo’s dependable incumbents – deeply embedded across the industry but often seen as less innovative than newer cloud-native entrants. Mr Galindosaid he was excited about the challenge of moving perception from a legacy provider to a platform capable of supporting the next generation of digital cargo operations. 

Air Canada’s comments suggest that effort may be gaining traction. 

Rather than selecting a finished product, the carrier appears to have spent several years watching CHAMP’s roadmap unfold before ultimately deciding the company was moving in the right direction. 

The result is a significant endorsement of the neo platform. If CHAMP’s future depends on proving it can reinvent itself while retaining the scale and reliability that made it an industry standard, winning Air Canada Cargo is the right kind of customer validation. 

More broadly, the project highlights a challenge familiar to many airline cargo executives: choosing a new system can be difficult, but securing the funding, internal support and organisational commitment to replace it can take even longer.