Founded in 1983 as an air freight specialist, Vienna-based cargo-partner has been an integral part of the international transport industry for more than three decades. In the past several years, the company has been focussing strongly on the expansion of its worldwide warehouse network and as its third main pillar next to air and sea freight. With its steadily increasing logistics competences in Europe, Asia, and the USA, supported by the perfect mix of its road transport and parcel service partners, cargo-partner covers all important hubs, creating a solid basis to augment customers’ international production and distribution networks by offering a comprehensive service package.
Preparing for the pandemic
cargo-partner team in India took action and began learning from its network in other countries in Asia when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out. Moreover, with some of our team’s experience in managing past crises, we were able to quickly establish a business continuity program (BCP) with focus on safety, digitisation, and uninterrupted services. We enabled our workforce to work from home with access to systems and stable Wi-Fi connection in a record time of less than 48 hours. We were also quick to establish a 24×7 EMERGENCY Desk as we expected disruption across many areas in the supply chain such as local transportation, freight capacity for air, and brokerage.
Overall, we have managed to do record business over the past many months during across all product types, bearing in mind that we have to adjust to the new normal.
Cost-effective service excellence
cargo-partner 24×7 EMERGENCY Desk was established to address the urgency which many business owners had during the pandemic. We managed to tailor cost-effective solutions in a timely manner for our customers.
Our global network had foreseen the challenge of capacity at the very start of the pandemic in January 2020. This helped us to establish regular bi-weekly air freight charter capacity much earlier, giving us some cost and capacity advantage. We partnered with passenger carriers to support the ‘cargo-on-seat’ program, introduced gateway program for exports from India so as to focus on building scale and density, and established multimodal solutions as an alternative for customers to address the rising costs.
Strategy under uncertainty
We had a robust BCP group which had representation from all functions and departments within cargo-partner, they met on a daily basis to share and learn from each other’s experience. This was probably the best way to tackle a problem which threw new challenges every day, while robust decision making helped us to overcome key challenges in our business.
Understand and forecast customers’ evolving needs for services
The only thing which is constant is ‘Change’. This could not have been more relevant now. Customer’s demands and expectations evolved based on how the pandemic unfolded.
Looking at this, we had to develop door-to-door premium service for customers who wanted ‘Test Kits’ deliveries in a temperature-controlled environment in less than 24 hours.
Data quality is so important
cargo-partner has invested in an Operational Excellence Program with focus on Training and Quality Management (TQM) and continuous improvement. This has been the cornerstone of our success, helping us to retain business and grow our market share.
Data integrity, event timeliness, and accuracy are key organisational focus areas, as ‘information’ is the key aspect of how we build transparency and trust with our customers.
Our visibility and collaboration platform SPOT allows us to deliver a near real-time tracking capability for air, with a host of other world-class features such as transport order and documents management, purchase order level visibility, messaging and reporting capabilities.
Creating and managing a knowledge base
Agility is the key to success in an ever-evolving environment. Our teams have full access to systems; they remain always accessible to customers and focuses on speed in response both internally and externally.
We have established a strong knowledge-rich team whose decision making abilities accelerates response to the unexpected events and disruptions.
Every change is an opportunity and our high-performance teams have focussed on delivering effective solutions to customers.
