The future is about stabilising and refining systems

Electronic solutions are the roots that nourish today’s freight industry, and the plant has survived and grown accordingly, according to Arnold Garber, chairman of freight system specialists, Compu-Clearing. “When we look at the number of transactions that are processed today compared to 20 years ago, we see that SA imports and exports are now about 10-times as many as they were then,” he told FTW. “At the same time, the number of people employed to handle this processing has also grown, but only by a relatively small fraction. “That’s an electronic solution.” In the old manual systems, a bill of lading (BoL) had to be produced by hand, and about eight other copies prepared for all the users in the chain. All-in-all, according to Garber, a task that burnt up time and effort to achieve. But with electronic data interchange (EDI) it’s only a press of a button away, he added. While EDI had a bit of a bumpy start five years ago, it’s now running very smoothly – and helps the industry to communicate information, like cargo tracking quickly, easily and accurately. “Just enter the BoL number into our system,” said Garber, “and the information you want is instantly available.” He also feels that the world of electronics has changed our lives, and described us as “privileged” to have lived through the era of the biggest change. But he suggested that this period of developmental change had now peaked, and these days any changes will be designed to achieve stabilisation – and nothing dramatic. “In the freight industry, the big changes have been made in the past five years, and now is a period of stabilising, refining and streamlining systems,” Garber said. He also pointed to newcomers coming into the trade now, and not really knowing the details of processing because they have never had to produce documents manually. “They just press the button, and get an answer,” he said. But at the same time, this electronic tool helps to ease the need for the extensive training that was previously required – and provides its own answer to the drastic skills shortage plaguing the industry. “Also,” he told FTW, “we would be physically unable to process the sheer volumes of documentation we now produce without electronics.” The trick of the moment for the systems service providers, Garber added, is a continual development of new system features – without in any way disrupting the systems presently in place at the service providers’ and clients’ premises. “To achieve this at Compu- Clearing,” he said, “we spend a lot of time, effort and money on research and development (R&D), an essential element in staying ahead of the game.”