One million AWBs and Growing

Last month, ECS Group’s Squair team verified its one millionth AWB since VERIFY operations first began in March 2020. Squair offers a crucial and unique back-office service to airlines and GSAs, enabling them to concentrate fully on tasks of higher value for customers. The speed of industry adoption is fanning further expansion.

Outsourcing necessary but labour-intensive and non-revenue-generating process steps provides GSAs and airlines the freedom to focus completely on front-end customer service, ultimately increasing overall customer satisfaction and benefitting business operations. Squair’s VERIFY offers AWB verification and data capture service as a stand-alone Ability. The teams process AWBs completely digitally, following up on billing queries where required, and consolidate and check cargo sales reports. This centralized process optimization means lower operational costs for customers, and results in fewer Charges Correction Advices (CCA) and disputes. ECS Group is the sole GSSA to offer this as a stand-alone service, which has rapidly gained traction in an air cargo industry otherwise faced with long-term resource challenges.

KPIs Prove Work Weight-Load Shift

“When Squair’s VERIFY product was launched in 2020, around 50,000 AWBs were processed in the first year. Today, our team handles that same amount in just a single month,” says Dimitri Arnaudin, Managing Director at Squair. “36 international clients located across America, Europe, Asia and Oceania now benefit from the expertise and reliability of our service, and our KPIs clearly show the weight of workload that no longer rests on their shoulders.” Those KPIs reveal that 95% of all AWBs are processed autonomously. Less than 5% of the AWBs verified generate the request for clarification from Squair’s customers so that data capture can be completed, and less than 1% of AWB verifications result in a CCA and change in invoice to customers, proving an overall reliability of more than 99%.

Accelerated Team Growth

Rapid growth in customer numbers led to the launch of a second Squair team in India in February last year, complementing the existing team in Bulgaria and opening the market to Far-East customers. By the end of 2023, Squair India had grown to a team of 14 people. “We now have 16 people working, and the plan is to keep growing the team up to 23 by the end of this year,” Arnaudin details.

Commitment to Sustainability

In sync with ECS Group’s strategy and values, Squair promotes diversity and gender equity. “To date, 57% of our team members are women, and at management level the ratio is 60% female,” he reveals.

The teams also benefit from ECS Group’s strong emphasis on digitalization and continuous process improvement. “Squair is a digital native and sustainable company. Since the beginning, we’ve made processes paperless. Historically, AWB verification was done through printed AWB copies. Squair works with 100% electronic versions and its processes are supported using entirely cloud-based IT architecture,” Arnaudin concludes.

Squair’s Strategic Growth in Global Operations

“Squair’s growth strategy is fine-tuned to ensure continued consistent compliance with our customers’ SLAs. We currently operate out of 2 centres: one in Europe, one in Asia,” Adrien Thominet, Executive Chairman of ECS Group, explains. “Within weeks of inaugurating our India office last year, we began services in APAC, marking our first step in the region. Since then, we have attracted more data capture activities for this region, including Japan in July 2023, and Australia and New Zealand in December – all adding to our solid customer base in Western Europe and Northern America.”