The International Air Transportation Association’s (IATA) ONE Record is a standard for data sharing and creates a single record view of the shipment. This ONE Record standard is designed to define a common data model for the data that is shared via a standardised and secured web application programming interface (API).

The standard is based on mature, progressive data sharing technologies that are aligned with the best practices used by leading airlines. This makes it accessible to IT teams and service providers.

With digitalisation and standardisation growing in importance across airfreight, Erik Goldenstein, the recipient of the 2024 IATA FACE-UP award has developed an app built on the ONE Record Data Standard.

The app provides a visualisation of ONE Record data to give a very simplified overview of complex air cargo data. This allows organisations to browse through their shipment data as easily as browsing the web, facilitating optimisation of their operational processes.

“When talking of NE:ONE Play, I think the FACE-UP competition was a huge opportunity to present the tool on the largest possible stage,” Goldenstein explained.

“I am really thankful for all the people in the room who voted for me and in general I saw this as a message that even if you are just starting out in the industry you can still have real impact if the things you do create enough value for everyone involved.

“This award can be seen as a signal of the industry that a tool like NE:ONE Play and in general tools and even more so an ecosystem around ONE Record is wanted by everyone who is into digitalisation of our industry. I see this as the starting point for some interesting things to come.”

Supporting the sector

NE:ONE Play is marketed as the easiest, and currently only, way to work with ONE Record data in a user friendly way. As ONE Record becomes mandatory by January 2026, according to IATA, more parties are starting efforts to adopt the standard.

“NE:ONE Play makes the ONE Record workflow significantly easier, bringing value to everyone who has to work with the standard by making the data easily visible and even enabling non-technical people to add and edit data as they need,” Goldenstein highlighted.

“By doing all of this NE:ONE Play supports the airfreight industry in making understanding and teaching ONE Record easier, enabling developers who implement ONE Record at their company to be quicker in their work and make fewer errors. It lets business analysts see ways of optimising processes which all in all leads to a much quicker and easier adoption of ONE Record in the industry.

“On another note, to everyone currently trying to implement ONE Record at their company, we at Fraunhofer IML at Frankfurt Airport developed an open-source implementation of the standard called the NE:ONE Server as a starting point to streamline adoption for the whole industry.”

Innovate and standardise

ONE Record is seen as pivotal in standardising digitalisation within the airfreight sector. Essentially, it introduces a unified digital record for each shipment, which all stakeholders can access. This not only eliminates the redundancy of data but also enhances transparency across the entire shipping process. Everyone involved—from airlines to ground handlers—can see the same information in real-time, reducing errors and boosting efficiency.

Moreover, ONE Record’s standardised data model works to ensure that different systems and organisations can communicate seamlessly, which is crucial for interoperability. This standardisation fosters innovation by facilitating the development of new tools and services that can integrate easily with existing systems. All of this improves operational efficiency and drives forward the digital transformation of the industry.

“I think I am not shocking anyone by saying that the airfreight industry is quite hesitant with adapting digitalisation. I feel like as soon as one player adapts something that gives them a competitive advantage everyone will be eager to catch up,” Goldenstein outlined.

“If we have enough thought leaders who show the rest of the industry that they are able to operate more efficiently, cheaper or with less manual labour by implementing some technological innovation everyone will want to get there and the demand for technological innovation will be huge.

“With ONE Record it is even more complicated. Although the benefits are obvious, we do not only need a single player to adopt it to show the benefits, we need their whole supply chain to adopt it to show the benefits it provides in terms of improving efficiency and operating costs.

“This is the exact reason why we invited stakeholders from all parts of the supply chain to work together in the DTAC research project to focus on their parts in the integration of ONE Record. I think step by step we will get the airfreight industry to adopt new technologies.

“I am keen to see all the innovation that the future will bring. Going beyond data exchange we at Fraunhofer also see huge potential for innovation in all kinds of other areas, from autonomous vehicles on the apron, integrating Internet of Things (IoT) data more tightly to ensure quality, using computer vision to automate ULD (Unit Load Device) build-up and much more, all of this is research that is being conducted by Fraunhofer IML and that we see a lot of potential for in the future.”