“The economic downturn is a right time for us to speed up implementation and system upgrades,” said Tan. “It’s easier to have downtime approval because air cargo throughput has dropped.” He added that it’s also a time when more tech talent is available.
Air cargo throughput in Hong Kong dropped 26.9 per cent in January and February year-on-year as global demand plummeted on the back of the global economic recession.
Among the IT projects Hactl is looking at include server consolidation and virtualisation, adoption of ITSM/ITIL, and wireless network upgrade. Tan added the company wants to look into business intelligence in order to make better use of its 52 TB of data.
With the drop in cargo, has also come a drop in data, with the average data volume growth dropping from 20 per cent in the past few years, to what the company anticipates will be around a 3-5 per cent growth rate this year.
Despite competitor Asia Airfreight Terminal’s deployment of RFID – based truck control since late 2006, Hactl has no plans to implement a similar system. An earlier RFID trial indicated that present methods were just as efficient and specifically RFID tags on liquid items were hard to detect while metallic items interfered with RFID devices.