News / ONE Record a 'turning point', bringing real-time booking updates

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Handler Swissport can now see customer Cathay Cargo’s real-time booking updates, in a first for ONE Record, a near-four-year old initiative.

Cathay Cargo, Champ Cargosystems and Swissport said today they had gone live with the first joint use case.

ONE Record is becoming an increasingly popular concept, as it aims to provide a standard for data sharing, and creates a single record view of a shipment.

Labelled a “turning point” by the participants, the use case gives Swissport real-time booking updates, allowing it to plan properly.

“We started to focus on what could add value most quickly,” said Champ CCO Nicolas Xenocostas,

“Our mindset is shifting from pilots to real production use cases that are actually generating value early in the journey,” he told delegates at WCS in Hong Kong today.

But he warned that more in the industry would need to embrace the initiative.

“This first step is good, but for the industry to get the full benefits of One Record, we need a critical mass of adoption. And this is the focus of our challenge –  implementing it at scale to provide the biggest benefit to the community.”

He said Champ planned to focus on the higher ROI use cases first. And he added: “I would say the focus should be on “new areas” or the “black holes” in our operations.

“One example is e-commerce – nothing really exists today, and to implement such a use case with C-IMP messaging is impossible, given the sheer volume of data.”

However, he warned that there was a significant volume of data with ONE Record.

“We need to be mindful that this will have the inherent effect of drastically increasing the number of exchanges, or API/URL calls, across the industry.

“As an example, there are approximately 25 messages per air waybill (AWB). Now, if we model this into API calls, there would be approximately 195 – which is eight times more exchanges.

“We have just launched our e-commerce customs service and we are seeing between 10k and 15k of data items per AWB… again, when you start extrapolating these numbers across the industry, the numbers grow extremely fast.

“From our implementation, we have found that the complexity level is quite high, and we need to start thinking about how we remove this complexity, and how we simplify it.”

He also noted that not everyone was able move at the same pace, so Champ was looking at creating a low entry barrier ONE Record service for the 4,000-strong Champ community.

“Our main focus in early adoption.”