Air Cargo is the fastest way to get your shipments from one point to another regardless where the goods are and where they need to go. Usually, shipments can happen in under a day even from Madrid, Spain to Melbourne, Australia. If you have goods that need to be shipped in an instant, like perishables or fast moving consumer goods, air cargo is a good option for you. Also, if you need to move expensive machinery or spare parts from China to the United States, you may opt for air freight, as you can your goods that are essential for your business a lot faster than if you shipped by a vessel. Luxury goods are also using air cargo to deliver products to showrooms all over the world.
Air cargo got just one problem: if you want to track your goods, whether for optimizing your supply chain or for safety reasons, you’ll have a hard time finding a useful tool. Air cargo tracking gets especially tricky when you are working with more than one cargo airline – and often, this is the case. Some companies with large volumes of air shipments may work with over 30 airlines.
How do these companies track air cargo now?
Honestly, if you are working with many airlines, it gets very complicated to stay on top of your shipments. Let’s assume that you work with 10 airlines, and you want to track all your shipments, you will have to visit all 10 airlines websites separately and insert your air waybill numbers.
How to simplify air cargo track and trace?
Instead of manually checking in with all the airlines that you are using for shipping, you should automate this process entirely. Integration solutions can make it quickly possible.
Connect with airlines for air shipment tracking
One option is that you connect with all your air cargo partner airlines by using system integrations. Most airlines have public APIs that can be used for connectivity, however, in some cases, it is more difficult than that to connect your applications to the systems of the airlines. Unless you have an internal integration team, you will perhaps need to find a partner that can help you with connecting all the airlines. Typically, you will need to give your vendor a letter of authorization, so they can proceed with connecting your systems to those of the airlines.
AWB Tracking
Once you are connected with all the air cargo airlines, you can start tracking your goods using AWB Tracking. When you are using a data integration solution for air freight tracking, the solution will automatically fetch all the tracking numbers from your systems and check the status of your air shipments from each airlines systems. This can all happen in real-time, so your team can continuously follow the status of your goods, get alerts if you prefer, and integrate the data into your applications, so you don’t have to go to the websites of the airlines, but you can see all the data in a single place.
Benefits of automating your air cargo tracking
Using Air Waybill Tracking is the simplest form of following the route of your goods across all the airlines you work with.
Airline cargo tracking has been challenging in the past. The adoption of electronic air waybills improved the situation a bit. AWB tracking also made possible that now you can automate your air cargo track and trace.
Tracking air cargo automatically will save you significant time that you would otherwise spend my visiting airline web pages frequently. By integrating your systems to the ones of the airlines, you will also be able to get the information on all your shipments in real-time from all the airlines.
You will be able to see all your business-critical shipment information within a single preferred application. If you want, it’s also possible to visualize your data.
How can Youredi help you with your air cargo tracking?
Youredi is an integration platform as a service (iPaaS) company that is providing fully managed integration services.
How does this relate to waybill tracking and air parcel tracking?
We have been helping our customers, for example, retailers and manufacturers, to connect with all the airlines that they use for shipping their goods or purchases all around the world.
This means that our customer provides Youredi with a letter of authorization, so our Professional Services team can get in touch with the airline’s IT team and get all the necessary information, so we can start to develop the connectivity between your system and the one of the airline. For this, you do not have to have an IT team. It’s enough that you have one person on the team that helps our team with specs about your applications.
Once we have developed the connectivity, we can start tracking your shipments based on your AWBs and deliver all the shipment tracking information to your preferred endpoint.
We will also maintain all integration solutions on your behalf, so if anything would change on the end of the airlines, you don’t have to worry that you won’t receive your data, we will make the changes.
Can you connect with any airlines for air cargo tracking?
Yes, you can definitely connect with any airlines.
We have been connecting our customers to over 30 airlines already. Some of these are Lufthansa, Emirates, DHL, Cathay Pacific, and the list goes on.
If you have a specific airline in your mind that you want to connect with and you’re not sure if it’s possible, you can always just drop a line to us, and we will get back to you in a couple of hours.
Typically, we can tackle any integration challenges – even the most complex airline on-premise legacy systems. Just give us the letter of authorization, and we will automate and simplify your air cargo tracking.
