Cargo Chat: DHL Global Forwarding on priorities amid the pandemic

In October, Tim Robertson took the reins of DHL Global Forwarding’s Americas region as its new CEO after the retirement of Bill Meahl. Freight forwarders have faced significant upheaval this year; the necessity of remote work spurred an abrupt push to digitalize processes that have resisted change until 2020, and, with capacity at a shortage across airfreight and ocean freight, planning for future success is a necessity. Air Cargo World spoke with Robertson to learn more about his leadership plans for Deutsche Post DHL’s forwarding division, and how DGF is confronting the operational difficulties posed by the pandemic. [caption id="attachment_93849" align="alignright" width="400"] Tim Robertson, CEO, DHL Global Forwarding Americas[/caption] ACW: Now that you’ve settled into the new role, what are your plans for guiding the division in the upcoming years? TR: Firstly, and looking at the short term, the key priority that I have, and that we have shared with the team here across the region, is first and foremost to keep our employees safe and protected through the current environment — and also, to do the same for our customers. And No. 2 is to support our management and leadership teams across the region to deliver on what we call our “three bottom lines.” And this guides our priorities in terms of being the employer of choice, the provider of choice and the investment of choice. So whatever it is that I need to do, to support our teams to deliver and to execute on their specific plans, that guides my short-term priority here. Longer term, I don’t see any need for a major shift in the direction of our organization or of the region, the strategy, that we are driving globally, which really tries to simplify our organization and has been proven to be very effective and helps us deliver results. I don’t see a major shift in what that direction is, but if anything, it’s an emphasis in certain areas. It’s a relentless focus on execution of the strategy and also a relentless focus on delivering high-quality customer service and operations to our clients. ACW: It sounds like overall strategy hasn’t changed that much, but there is an emphasis on certain areas. Can you elaborate on that? TR: One of the key trends currently facing our organization, and our industry today, is the trend of digitalization. Certainly, in the pandemic times, COVID has been an accelerator of this digitalization trend. For me, and for the region here, this will become a very critical part of our success moving forward. It’s digitalization from two perspectives. One, it’s digitalization in terms of how we interact and the experience we provide to our customers, and we’re making some significant investments here with our new myDHLi platform launched earlier this year into the marketplace. Through the pandemic, we have seen this significantly accelerating with a lot of our customers’ operations being remote or work from home. Now, they have the ability to quote a shipment directly, get a real-time quotation online to convert that real-time quotation into an electronic booking, then track the shipment in near real-time with automated push notifications, generating an electronic invoice and then paying electronically. Secondly, the other piece of digitalization that we will be emphasizing is our own internal operations and processes that support the customer. This is everything from receiving the booking, the management of documents electronically, which is something that we have been doing for a number of years, and also the management of all the data in our operating systems in an automated fashion. Another important area that is near and dear to my heart, having been a station manager in the past, is that we will be making significant investments in upskilling, developing and training our station management and leadership organizations in a couple of different areas, a lot of it to do around supervisory skills, a lot about managing a flexible workforce in a digitalized environment. ACW: One of the issues that has frequently arisen with forwarders is the difficulty in securing capacity. How has the Americas Division of DHL Global Forwarding secured capacity for shippers? TR: This has been one of the key learnings that we have had from the early days in late March, where the organization here in the Americas was extremely agile, to secure additional own-controlled capacity that would allow us to do two things. No. 1 was to protect existing customer demand. And No. 2 was to support the very significant demand for PPE that was moving, and continues to move for that matter, in and out of the region. Today, we operate seven flights a week; these are our own flight operations from China into the U.S, into Chicago and Los Angeles. And then we operate three a week from Europe into JFK and Chicago. These are dedicated scheduled flight operations that are over and above the significant number we’ve done — in the order of hundreds — of customer-specific charters to support our customers’ capacity needs. The decision to significantly invest in our flight operations is a decision that historically forwarders don’t like to make, because for your non-asset-based organization, this is now significant asset risk that you have. But our leadership team in the airfreight organization had great foresight in terms of what was to come, and that access to capacity would be the No. 1 requirement to keep supply chains running. We have also looked at a wide variety of multimodal solutions to support our customer base. A great example is a product that we are running called “MMX,” which is a multimodal solution out of China into various points in Latin America via our Miami hub. And this is an ocean freight solution into the West Coast and expedited across the country via land move, and then it’s an airfreight solution down into various destinations in Latin America. So, this has been a cost-effective solution for a number of our shippers and consignees. But it has also been another way to manage access to capacity getting into markets in Latin America that continue to be quite challenged from a capacity perspective.

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