ORLANDO – Former Emirates SkyCargo head Ram Menen, even in retirement, proved that he can still captivate an air cargo audience during his keynote address yesterday for the Opening Session of the CNS Partnership Conference. His message was warmly received, but his message was mostly an admonishment as he scolded the industry for its painfully slow embrace of electronic air waybills (e-AWBs) and other e-freight basics.
Menen, who during his 40-year career practically re-invented the idea of cargo transport, said the time is ripe and long-overdue for another transformation away from the paper and towards electronic record-keeping.
“But we still can’t get rid of this paper,” he said. “It seems the only way to move ahead is to fire anyone over 25 and start recruiting 10-year-olds.” The industry has spent many years trying to adopt technology “that any 10-year-old will have no hesitation to use. Meanwhile, some people here still have trouble turning on their cell phones,” he joked.
With his “better perspective” of the industry since his retirement two years ago, Menen had praise for the elevation of air cargo as a true profession. In his younger days, he half-joked, air cargo was a loose collection of fragmented businesses that one entered if “you were not good at anything or upset someone.” Today, however, those in air cargo “stopped feeling sorry for themselves” and created their own professional organizations, where everyone knows each other.
Later in the speech, Menen went even further, looking ahead to a near future when even electronic devices will be considered old-fashioned. We are on the cusp, he said, of a new revolution in the way we power our lives, called the “memoristor.” (A show of hands fielded only one or two people who had ever heard of them.)
Rather than using bulky transistors, this new bleeding-edge technology will deliver power on a more direct, atomic level, working more like a human brain than a machine. When merged with flexible, ultra-thin, ultra-light “graphene” displays, this technology “will be the end of the electronics era,” Menen predicted. “Memoristers will free us from binary code.”
In addition to requiring far less energy to operate, the devices can also be stopped and restarted instantly, with no loss of data and no need to store anything in memory. “This will be the death knell of tablets and laptops,” he said, which could have a drastic effect on the types of cargo that will be shipped by air. “When you think about the possibilities, the imagination goes wild.”
Menen also called for greater communication within the industry, including input from shippers. “We need to start a dialog,” he said. “Who are these shippers? It’s their money were playing around with. We are all peas if the same pod and we all hold difference expertise.” If we haven’t figured out what these customers want after 25 to 30 years, “we should all be kicking ourselves,” he added.
“If you don’t change, then change will be forced onto you,” he said. “The change will come from the likes of Google and Amazon.”
Change, he added, means more than reacting to something but preparing for change well in advance. “You have to change a little bit before the actual change happens.”
As we look to the future of air cargo, Menen called for more unity and collaboration. “Those who control the last mile will control the industry,” he added. “And really, you guys stink when it comes to the last mile. Stop trying to create unusual efficiencies and try creating collective efficiency. The only thing you don’t want to change is human contact.”