Frankfurt Airport develops digital registration process for cargo sector

Air Cargo Community Frankfurt is unifying the registration process for truck drivers at the airport. This step aims to reduce the coordination effort between hauliers, forwarders and handling agents by decreasing the duration of stops at the registration within CargoCity.

Currently there are waiting times to be expected with every loading and unloading of carriers that are commissioned by the air freight forwarders. Kai-Oliver Schocke, Professor at the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, conducts a scientific research of the freight area at Frankfurt Airport since 2013: “We expect to save ten minutes per truck by digitizing the check-in. With more than 1,000 trucks that arrive on a daily basis at the airport, this means significant time saving and reduction of costs for both, forwarding agents and carriers on one hand, and handling agents and airlines on the other.”

He involves 70 students from the department of logistics and production management in this project. They examine how to match legal requirements with the additional company-specific form fields that are required by six different handling agents at Frankfurt airport. In the near future, all participants in the supply chain want to use unified paper forms so that each one of them can find the relevant information more quickly.

The next step will be the implementation of a digital form by using a cargo community system. “This will help to improve cooperation between all companies along the supply chain within CargoCity. Being the largest European cargo airport, we aim to optimize our efficiency with the new digital registration process”, explains Patrik Tschirch, executive at Air Cargo Community Frankfurt.