Slot Booking App users of the month - April 2019
Slot Booking App users of the month - April 2019
23 May 2019 | General
Since April, Air Cargo Belgium and Brussels Airport Company have started with the intense follow-up of the usage of the Slot Booking App. On a monthly basis, statistics, KPI’s and also the “Slot Booking App users of the month” will be communicated. In April Nippon Express and Air Promotions Agencies had the best Slot Booking results in terms of absolute amount of correctly used slots and the percentage of correctly used slots. Congratulations! We had the opportunity to have a short conversation with Raf Van Espen (Nippon Express) and Maria Cranshof (Air Promotions Agencies).
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Van Espen: “100% Slot Booking and a 24/7 service, that is the future!”
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What is your secret to the good Slot Booking App (SBA) results? Van Espen: We have an internal monthly meeting and SBA is a recurrent topic on this meeting. During the meeting the Slot Booking KPI’s are showed and discussed. At this moment, the SBA is not yet used 100% correctly within our community, and thus we are not yet realizing all benefits, but we are convinced that Slot Booking is the way forward. That is the reason why we focus on this project! Cranshof: The secret is a good planning and good communication with the warehouse employees. Our EDD-screening is tuned to Slot Booking. The warehouse receives delivery lists per slot and we take their feedback into account when planning slots.
Did you change your internal processes to fit into Slot Booking Application? Van Espen: Yes. We started right away to book export slots and make sure that these slots were respected and followed-up correctly by our staff. We recently started with increasing the focus on import slots but we want to improve this even more.
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Van Espen: “Slot means priority. This is something I have made very clear to my operational staff.”
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What do you expect form the other freight forwarders in the project to turn Slot Booking App into a success story? Van Espen: I suppose and hope that the other freight forwarders also want to book as much as possible slots? The biggest “issues” have to be tackled by the ground handlers, from my perspective. Cranshof: We expect that they respect the booked slot reservations and cancel their slots when these are not needed. The latter will give the opportunity to other forwarders to book more last minute slots.
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Cranshof: “Forwarders should respect Slot Booking reservations and cancel slots when not needed”
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So, what do you expect from the ground handling agents? Van Espen: Ground handlers should be more committed to offer Slot Booking 24/24 and 7/7, so that we can move to 100% Slot Booking pick-up and deliveries. We already mentioned this a couple of times in the meetings. We will not be there tomorrow, but we need to evolve gradually. Cranshof: We would like to see an expansion in the offered capacity, both in terms of available gates and warehouse personnel that handle the slots.
Do you have people fully dedicated to Slot Booking? Van Espen: Yes, we have moved to this approach because we believe in the application. The ultimate goal is that slots means priority. This is something I have made very clear to my operational staff and something I keep on mentioning.