The optimized AFRA product is expected to become the standard for air freight rates management by airlines and their customers, and is the culmination of a three-year development project with significant investment by OAG Cargo, embracing the company's eight years of acquired knowledge in air freight rates management, pre-transport decision-making and analysis.
AFRA Optimized & enhanced is a completely rewritten and improved version of the cargo rates management tool that, since its launch in 2003, has become a key rate and surcharge distribution mechanism for 920 airlines and 300 cargo GSAs, which together publish more than five million rates for AFRA's 12,600 individual users globally at more than 900 freight forwarding companies.' It is still the most widely used global rates communication product in the market today.
As OAG Cargo sets for further expansion of AFRA, customers can continue to rely on exceptional performance and response times which in some cases have been able to be improved even further.' Among the many new features added to the application is 'e-acceptance'.' This allows airlines and forwarders to communicate and record online rate agreements, reducing subsequent potential billing discrepancies. A second example is 'spot price' capturing, which enables the recording of rates that have been agreed ad-hoc by telephone and email.' Additional features include currency conversions of rates, zone-specific rates, as well as multiple pdf and excel templates for mass distribution of rates by email.
Surcharges, particularly fuel, also form an integral part of the newly launched rate management system, having become such an important element in the cost of air freight.
Various options to personalise the information for specific contracts or relationships are available, giving airlines full control over which customers can see their tariffs, spot prices, and surcharges, supported by multiple levels of security to provide unique protection of data. It also provides direct links from the rates results page to airlines' own booking sites or preferred booking portals.
OAG Cargo is offering a wide range of license options, from basic access to AFRA for a small fee per month, right up to customized Enterprise solutions for global companies. During the development cycle, OAG Cargo has regularly engaged with its current AFRA clients ' airlines and forwarders alike ' to ensure that their requirements will be met with the new version. Customers were also actively involved in testing the beta-release of the new AFRA.
Dirk de Rooij, Executive Vice President of OAG Cargo, said: 'The new version of AFRA sets the standard for rate management. It is loaded with new features and benefits for airlines and forwarders of all sizes, and as a scalable web-server solution it delivers improved performance and response times for general rates, promotional rates, customer contract rates and now also spot rates.
Having a structured process around the communication of rates is recognized as an effective way for airlines to lower costs, offer a single access point for all rates and to quickly reach out to the international forwarding community. The addition of spot prices in AFRA reflects the fact that many bookings are being placed on this basis. We have noticed however that frequently both airlines and forwarders have very little structure in the capture of spot prices as they are agreed by email and phone. This can cause errors in billing, which in return can result in disputes later. AFRA can now prevent this and actually save both airlines and forwarders time and money. This is a particularly important new feature given that spot prices currently account for 80% of available tariffs in some markets, which puts additional pressure on airlines to manage and market rates and time-limite
