Service Delivery Management

In October’s inSight we introduced our six strategic focal points, divided into two different themes: The Basics, addressing the industry basics, and The Future, helping our industry to be ready for future opportunities.

Within the basic focal points, one aim is to provide the industry with a standard and tool for service delivery management that is used by Cargo iQ members: ensuring use as an actual Service Delivery Management tool for all members.

In this issue, we address our focus on the Service Delivery Management and how this fits with Cargo iQ’s projects, for instance the Exception Handling Code Procedure Project spotlighted this month.

Service Delivery Management is the core of Cargo iQ’s value proposition. After all, we are a collaborative, multi-stakeholder, supply-chain community improving the air cargo customer experience by realizing real time end-to-end transparency, offering an industry quality management system, and making sure our Standards and Practices effectively facilitate ever evolving business models and needs.

We interpret Quality Management as working on Planning, Control and Evaluation of our industry’s handling of shipments. The customer value of that quality management, however, isn’t delivered by the organization of Cargo iQ; it is delivered by its members and since our industry’s service delivery model so interconnected, it has to be delivered by our members working together, as per our mission: Plan • Deliver • Learn | Together.

Realizing that our industry’s service delivery is so dependent on multiple parties working together – we refer to that as a distributed service delivery model – Cargo iQ facilitates industry cooperation through reliable process outcomes.

We maintain high level, but detailed process descriptions for the whole shipment journey in our door-to-door Master Operating Plan (MOP), which has gained industry wide recognition and forms the basis for IATA’s Industry MOP.

We have created standard descriptions of process outcomes along the shipment journey that members need to be update each other on, called milestones. These milestones are largely reflected in the MOP and are more and more used by the industry as whole.

We have standard ways through which our members create, share, and update their planning for shipments, called routemaps. These routemaps allow our carriers and forwarders to not merely share the progress of shipments with their customers but to actually create full transparency on execution vs planning. Because only when progress information is accompanied by planning transparency customers can a provider and their customer manage a continuous reliable expectation of service delivery to align their planning and contingencies.

Because service delivery management is so closely linked to planning and control, we need our information to be as timely as possible and that is why managing information latency has a high priority in our current work.

Part of planning and control is creating contingencies and opportunities to correct impending service problems before they manifest. For that reason the information we share needs to closely match the operational reality, allowing operational correction. This is illustrating how our strategic focusses are supporting each other, after all ‘Real Business, Real Targets’, is another of our strategic focus point.

In reality our objective to provide a standard for our members to manage their service delivery is closely linked to all the other strategic objectives. To offer a reliable delivery management tool, all our shipments need to be covered by it. We also need to make sure we always clearly agree on what service is to be delivered, so that’s why we work on clear service parameters allowing to express differences between service commitments in a meaningful way.

And that’s also why we need to develop the membership. Of course we aim to grow, so more shipments will be covered through more of their journeys, but we also need to actually develop our existing membership. With a focus on true and complete implementation. Because managed service delivery is the core to Cargo iQ.

Part of managing service delivery is realizing that things will sometimes go different from planning. Often that can be corrected, however sometimes it leads to delays and changes in planning that affect the customer. In any case, these changes require clear communication to allow replanning, corrective action and learning opportunities for service improvement. To read a bit more on what Cargo iQ is working on to address that, read our upate on Exception Handling Coding that you find elsewhere in this inSight.