Award-winning air cargo terminal continues to grow

Four key success areas were identified by Lilian Chan as key to the impressive growth of Hong Kong's main air cargo terminal, HACTL, to the number one in the world.

Ms Chan is the general manager, marketing and customer service, of Hong Kong Air Cargo Terminals Ltd (HACTL). Assuming airline connectivity, she mentioned sufficient IT development to support the flow and eventual build-up of cargo; consistent, high quality service; communicating with customers, treating them as partners, through a dedicated team; and automation.

HACTL, which has just been awarded Air Cargo Terminal of the Year at the Supply Chain Asia Logistics Awards 2007 (SCALA - for the second year in a row), takes automation as a given, with the terminal being almost 100 per cent automated.

Having toured the huge site and seen its super-efficient operations, one can only be impressed. Underlying all this is an attention to detail and, Ms Chan pointed out, the support of local government and customs.

"In Hong Kong, cargo handling and customs offices work 24/7. A lot of things would not be so smooth without their support in cargo declarations, cargo checking and the clearing process."

HACTL handles 2.56 million tonnes of cargo each year and growing. "For the past two years, transshipment has been a major source of growth - almost double digit for both years - apart from import and export cargo," Ms Chan said. "Because we have all the home-based carriers HACTL handles close to 98 per cent of the trans-shipment cargo of Hong Kong."

The biggest markets are the US and Europe, with Europe collectively surpassing the US, which remains Hong Kong's largest market.

HACTL uses IT not only for various e-initiatives, like the e-freight (an e-ticket for freight), but to monitor all cargo movements, through hand-held terminals and to help its customers' customers.

Two examples Ms Chan gave of this were pre-plane arrival customs clearance and import schedule collection. Cargo handlers are notified in advance when a piece of cargo arrives. HACTL will clear the goods from customs on their behalf and inform them that they have arrived. It will then notify by SMS which truck bay has been allotted for the cargo to be collected and traffic passes through in a one-way direction for the smoothest flow.

HACTL adopts the highest international quality standards, which enable it to document and set high service standards, ensuring consistency and reliability. "HACTL always takes the initiative to set the bar of standards to a higher level," Ms Chan said. "We actively evaluate areas where we can do things smarter and more efficiently, like the e-initiatives, with the co-operation of the entire community - airlines, cargo agents and the airport authority."

Further efficiency gains are obtained by justifying every single item of expenditure.

Another contributor to the smooth flow of cargo is its subsidiary HACIS, which provides cargo feeder and trucking services to and from the southern part of China. This one-stop-shop service, with a dedicated team, works with six dedicated inland cargo depots (ICDs) in Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Fuzhou, Humen, Xiamen and Huangpu.

Looking ahead, Ms Chan said the current Terminal 1 will reach its full capacity of 3.5 million tonnes of cargo by about 2015. Already with the terminal at 70 per cent of capacity, plans are in hand for the construction of a new terminal on an adjacent site.

Growth, she points out, is not straight line and cargo handling is not a storage process. "It is the procedure that counts, not the space you take up. The 2.56 million tonnes is the total record of throughput."

Still, HACTL is doing all it can to maximise its use of the current space, like setting up a Unit Load Devices (ULD) centre adjacent to the terminal building to store the unused ULDs.