Why cargo management still isn’t properly digital…yet (Part 1)

By Andrew Knott, Chief Technology Officer, Hermes Logistics Technologies

The problem isn’t technology

If you’ve been in cargo for a while, you’ll know we’ve been talking about the same goals for years: 

• Real-time visibility
• Paperless trade
• End-to-end digital processes.

It feels like we should have solved these by now. The technology clearly exists: Cloud platforms, APIs, structured data models and real-time messaging are all well established, and most organisations have invested heavily in systems. 

Yet day-to-day operations are still messy. Delays happen, information goes missing, data gets re‑keyed and teams are left trying to work out which version of the truth is the right one. 

It only takes one piece of paper to break everything

Cargo is only as digital as the least digital party in the chain.

Airlines, ground handlers, forwarders, agents, truckers and regulators all operate at different levels of digital maturity. As soon as one of them falls back to paper or unstructured documents, even temporarily, someone else has to manually turn that back into data.

At that point, “real-time visibility” becomes delayed visibility, driven by human intervention rather than live data flow.

We’re not missing a system, we’re missing alignment

Much of the conversation still frames this as a technology problem, but the real issue is alignment.

We don’t need more systems; we need better agreement on how data is shared, updated and trusted across organisational boundaries. This is why initiatives such as IATA’s ONE Record are important, they focus on consistent data models and interoperable data exchange, rather than moving documents between siloed platforms.

Why things fall apart at handover points

The problem becomes most visible at handover points between air, road and sea where responsibility changes.

At each handover you typically see:

• A different platform or service taking over
• A new reference or identifier being introduced
• Information shared as attachments instead of structured data or events.

The result is fragmented data, duplicated effort and multiple versions of the truth.

Forcing everything into a single system isn’t realistic, but agreeing on a small set of shared principles is. In practice, that usually means:

• Defining common operational events
• Maintaining a stable digital identity for a shipment
• Ensuring platforms can exchange data reliably via APIs and event-driven interfaces.

None of this is complex in principle, it simply requires coordination and commitment across the ecosystem.