95% stakeholders adopt BLR Airport’s cargo community system from Kale

October 27, 2021: The roll-out of Kale Logistics Solutions’ Airport Cargo Community System (ACS) at Kempegowda International Airport, Bengaluru, has been adopted by 95 percent of airport stakeholders.

The airport started the ACS operations six months back but is rolling it out in phases. First, it went live for the exports from Terminals 1 and then recently the imports also went live. The second Terminal will also go live as soon as the operations on terminal 1 stabilise. The full roll-out of the ACS at Bengaluru Airport is expected to be completed by March 2022.

Satyaki Raghunath, chief strategy and development officer, BIAL, said, “The idea for the ACS was that we could orchestrate the cargo community, including building a single-window platform, to provide full visibility across the supply chain.”

Already, the ACS has connected all air cargo stakeholders at the airport, including customs, customs brokers, terminal operators, shippers, airlines, trucking companies, ground and cargo handlers and freight forwarders.

Also read: BLR Airport implements IoT-based solution to monitor temp-controlled cargo real-time

Amar More, CEO of Kale Logistics Solutions, said, “Kale’s ACS is a next-gen community platform which will enable collaboration between stakeholders in the supply chain to launch new services and deliver superior customer experiences.”

“Our ACS is built on the principle of enabling a cohesive ecosystem of partnership and driving efficiency in air cargo operations with the highest level of data accuracy, security and compliance.”

BIAL also hopes to achieve full digitalisation at the airport in preparation for anticipated growth in cargo throughput.

For the ten years preceding the Covid pandemic, BIAL enjoyed 11 percent annual growth in cargo volumes; following a drop in figures between 2020 and 2021owing to the Covid lockdown in April and May 2020, volumes were running higher than pre-Covid levels by September 2021.

In August 2021, Bengaluru Airport broke records when it handled the highest monthly cargo throughput since it began operations in 2008.

Recent significant infrastructure developments have increased the airport’s annual cargo capacity from 570,000 to 720,000 tonnes, but tonnages are expected to continue growing well beyond this.

Since implementation, Kale’s ACS has made real-time data available to the whole cargo community at the airport, has significantly reduced duplication and manual data entry, which previously led to errors and wasted time, and has also reduced dwell times and improved security.

Further refinements to BIAL’s system are already planned, with modules and links to be added to the network, including freight corridors with partner airports and integration with a national airport community system, proposed by the government of India.