Portcast’s Air Shipment functionality allows you to track Master Airway Bills (MAWB) directly on our platform, via API and UI. Amongsts available information are shipment milestones which are provided by the carrier airline.

However, often times this data is difficult to sift through in order to find specific shipments that need attention, especially when a large amount of shipments are being tracked and downstream planning needs to be optimized.

In order to empower Portcast Air Shipment customers to better prioritize the MAWBs that need attention, and go beyond what the carrier information indicates, we’ve included an exceptions flagging functionality in Air Cargo shipments. Read on to understand what it works, what’s included and how to use it.

What are Air Shipment exceptions?

Air shipment exceptions are specific flags attached to Master Airway Bills (MAWBs) tracked inside the Portcast platform. Upon uploading new air shipments to the platform, the Portcast platform will fetch available carrier information for the air shipments contents, and, for ongoing voyages, start tracking changes regularly.

Often times, carrier information can be used to deprehend abnormal situations that can result in disruptions in the shipments’ voyage. These include:

• Situations where a shipment is split into multiple parts which undertake separate flights for the same leg;
• Events that indicate that the partial or the entirety of the shipment was offloaded and did not undertake the flight it was planned to;
• Cases where the delivered pieces and weight of the shipment are not matching with the total contents, indicating that only a part of the shipment is ready to clear customs or collect.

Portcast’s platform analyzes the shipments’ milestones to capture and flag which of the customer’s shipments might be affected by the above, and allows quick prioritization of these shipments using either the API or UI.

Which Air Shipment exceptions are available, and what do they mean?

The following air shipment exceptions are available on the Portcast platform:

• Weight mismatch at destination: raised for any MAWB where there is a difference between the expected weight at a destination (based on MAWB contents) and the actual observed weight in carrier milestones. Any difference between these should raise this flag. This takes the combination of multiple events into consideration.
• Piece mismatch at destination: raised for any MAWB where there is a difference between the expected pieces at a destination (based on MAWB contents) and the actual observed pieces in carrier milestones. Any difference between these should raise this flag. This takes the combination of multiple events into consideration.
• Split shipment: raised for any MAWB that includes any multi-flight leg detected via carrier events. This can include different flight numbers, or same flight number in different days. Split shipments flag are raised irrespectively of whether expected multiple booking events exist for the MAWB.
• Partial offload at origin: raised when a part of the MAWB's contents has been transferred to an unexpected (verified by matching with the associated booking milestones) separate flight for a leg.
• Total offload: raised when the entire contents of the AWB have been offloaded from the original flight. Typically followed by the contents of the AWB being transferred to a separate, different flight from the initially booked data.