Sales Operations in Microsoft Dynamics365 for Air Cargo

The client is an air cargo logistics provider.

An interesting thing about this industry is that most of the work is still done manually. The reason for this is the big number of parameters, conditions, and factors that should be taken into account to organize transportation. These factors also affect the final cost.

All the participants of the process are aware of the need for the digital transformation of the industry and shift to the electronic form of cooperation, however, just a few dare to do it. And since most of the processes are manual, a very small part of the necessary documentation and protocols is standardised, which only complicates the automation.

Earlier, the everyday work of the Company’s managers consisted of many similar routine operations, which were taking lots of energy. Waiting for responses from the participants of the process was also taking lots of time.

In general, the processing of clients’ requests looked like:

• Receiving a request for cargo transportation and collecting the basic information
• Putting together and sending a request to airlines’ managers
• Waiting for the responses from the airlines
• Preparing a quote for the client
• Waiting for the client’s response about the option they have chosen and receiving from them the information necessary at this step
• Adding details to the request and sending it to the shortlisted airlines
• And so on. This cycle could have been repeated 3-4 times just at the planning stage, not to mention further request execution and preparation of all the documentation

To organize one shipment, it is necessary to collect and process the following data:

• From the client:
  • Route and the dates (from which country and city to which country and city and when the shipment has to be done)
  • Cargo category (many goods require special conditions)
  • Cargo dimensions and number of pieces (the possibility of transportation by air depends to a great extent on the dimensions)
  • Cargo weight
• From the airline:
  • Flight destinations and schedule
  • Tariffs depending on the cargo characteristics
  • Up-to-date information about the available space on the planned flights

This information is the minimum required to find a matching flight. Once it’s found, it is necessary to prepare all the documents accompanying the shipment.

The process was done through phone calls, emails, and messengers, both between the Company’s manager and a client, and the manager and an airline.

A poorly organized process of data exchange was significantly reducing the speed of request processing and thus the overall performance. It became obvious that the optimization of the most time- and effort-consuming processes would lead to significant performance improvement, cost reduction, and company growth.

It was decided to implement a unified back-office system that would help the Company to achieve the following goals:

• Reduce the client’s waiting time for the request processing and the preparation of the documents required for the shipment
• Reduce the Company’s managers’ time for request processing
• Automate the process of data integration with partner airlines
• Integrate the system with a related SaaS solution for users

The main features planned for the system were:

• Clients and counterparties management: directories of customers’ and airline companies, contacts, a directory of contracts
• Customer relationship management: tracking incoming requests, scheduling meetings and calls
• Full support of the sales cycle: invoicing, sales management, promotion management, tracking marketing goals and KPIs
• Reports and different stats generation
• Administration of directories that affect pricing, such as tariffs, fees, airlines, flight schedules, etc.
• Administration of the client web application, including moderation of client accounts

As a standalone solution for integration with airlines, a service for converting air waybills was needed. It had to have the following functionality:

• Recognition of electronic versions of air waybills into datasets that can be operated
• Generation of electronic versions of air waybills based on the data stored in the system; these air waybills can then be exported to PDF or printed
• Based on the data stored in the system, generation of messages for exchange through the airlines’ internal systems (FWB and FHL)
• Transformation of FWB and FHL messages into datasets that can further be used for generating air waybills

To solve these tasks, we developed and implemented a unified tool that supports all the paperwork related to cargo transportation planning and execution. The basis of this solution is microservice architecture which allows to implement separate business functions as independent modules and makes the solution flexible and scalable.

For the core of the back-office system, we chose Microsoft Dynamics 365, since it’s a very flexible and adaptive system with lots of opportunities for integration. In addition to the main CRM functions, Dynamics 365 allows developing, launching, and tracking the efficiency of different marketing campaigns, such as newsletters, promotions, and others.

Together with Dynamics 365, we used other Microsoft cloud solutions as they help to provide a high level of security, stability, and speed; they also support integration with different third-party services.

As the main database, we used MS SQL Azure cloud service because it is secure, highly available, and easily scalable. For storing big data and for future implementation of a document management system (that would handle both external and internal documents) we used MS SharePoint Online.

We used .Net Core platform to implement the service for working with air waybills and functionality for synchronization with the clients’ user portal. For maximum availability and security, these services are also hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud, which makes it easy to support, update and manage them.

To recognize air waybills, we used AI solutions based on the Azure Cognitive Services, which allow implementing functional APIs. So, when a user uploads a file on the client portal, the original document is transferred to Cognitive Services, and after processing it, the application receives a completely parsed data model, which is saved to the database without any transformations. All model validations are implemented on the Cognitive Services side.

The project was launched in autumn 2021.

Managers in the company were now able to handle their tasks from personal accounts in which they had easy access to all the necessary tools, features, and documents. This helped to reduce the managers’ workload due to the automation of request processing related to small-sized and light cargo.

The managers’ time that was freed up started to be used for complex and large cargo calculations, as well as for cases with complex and non-typical routes, which are more profitable for the company, while their automation is not cost-effective yet.

Due to these changes, it also became possible to develop relations with new partners in forwarders domain and plan further work-processes optimization.