From just nine staff ten years ago, the Lufthansa Group company, has grown to 60 employees, handling the business of managing ULD fleets for 14 major airline customers – including industry leaders like Etihad and the Lufthansa Group – comprising an inventory of over 85,000 units.
“We are experiencing a strong and healthy growth which we want to continue in the coming years,” says Carsten Hernig, who has been managing director of Jettainer since early this year. “The business model of Jettainer is more relevant than ever. More and more airlines are discovering the ULD management as an opportunity to increase efficiency, optimise costs and to improve their environmental performance.”
Recent business developments include contract extensions with Alitalia and Etihad and the establishment of a new office in the Abu Dhabi Airport Business City’s Logistics Park. “Due to the positive development we are facing in the Middle East and Asia regions, we decided to open a local office in Abu Dhabi in order to assure smooth operational processes at any time and of course to be ready for further growth with existing and potential new customers,” said Carsten Hernig. The company also signed up a new customer – India’s Jet Airways – for outsourced ULD cargo services for a five-year period and covers the handling of 1,279 ULDs.
Creating an ‘appetite’
Hernig notes that generally speaking, if the market becomes more challenging for the airlines for whatever reason – be it the general economic conditions or be it competition for instance – they will look for outsourcing opportunities.
“What our organisation puts a focus on is the fact we want to offer a product that is so convincing that the airline will have an appetite to buy it no matter what the economic situation. Because through innovations, specifications and specialisations, we are aiming to simply manage the ULD fleets better, cheaper, more efficiently and more innovatively than the airlines would ever do themselves.”
Key to this is the “spirit of constant innovation” that runs through the company Hernig says, pointing to not just the materials and technology side of the equation, but the process aspect as well. “We have seen in the big hubs of big airlines it’s necessary to have a physical presence in their hubs in the sense you do not only provide ULD and pallet management in the classical sense, but also on one hand intervention on the spot when it’s needed and secondly also a constant training and awareness flow to the cargo handlers and the airlines.”
This includes, he says, defining the proper interfaces between the different actors – cargo agents, ground handling agents, the airline itself – and this is something Jettainer plans to increasingly roll out to its other customers and make it part of its standard product offering to customers.
“It’s important because there is a human factor in it and we are in the service industry so the things that are happening on the ground, things go wrong sometimes and when there is a human error involved to a large extent it can only be sorted out through human intervention.”
Indeed this is the old bugbear of the ULD sector – mishandling of ULDs – and one that leads to not just costly repairs but loss of productivity. “When you analyse the reasons for damage you can find patterns and then of course you can start to work on them. The problem in the past and to a large extent still is, is that no one has really registered and analysed this data continuously and on a structural basis,” he says. This is largely because from an airline perspective ULD management is not their core business and as such nobody really focuses on it.
“Whereas for us, it’s the core business so we are bringing exactly this specific focus into the business. And of course along with a lot of other innovations which would never have happened if there wasn’t a player who was really focused on this kind of business,” Hernig says.
Constant innovations
These innovations include a substantial investment in R&D including everything from materials in terms of lightweight containers, IT systems including a ‘big data’ type focus for more proactive management decisions and of course active container tracking.
Hernig says a typical airline probably has a 50 per cent overview on locations of its ULDs “because usually half of what you have is stashed away in a warehouse somewhere.” But he says, “with the tools we have today as Jettainer and with the innovations we have brought in, we have brought the threshold way beyond the 70-80 per cent mark.” This will hit 100 per cent with active emitting devices onboard each ULD and “this is what we want to achieve because this is the basis for further productivity increases. You have to know where your logistical devices are if you want to increase your logistics productivity – it’s as simple as that.”
Currently Jettainer is testing this type of active tracking in various ways, but a major stumbling block has been the batteries – both size and lifespan. “The last thing you want to do is run around chasing your ULDs just to change the batteries,” he says. Working with major partners Jettainer undertook a pilot project to test energy harvesting for the units, but current technology again was not capable enough to provide a workable solution. But with technological change becoming increasingly rapid, Hernig is confident that a solution will be available within the next two to three years.
On the topic of future developments, cold chain ULDs will be another likely area of focus for Jettainer, owing to the increasing focus on high yield temperature sensitive cargo like life sciences products. Currently the ULD specialist has no capability in the active cooling ULDs, but anticipates it will be part of the product offering in the very near future.
