Hand carry: the globetrotters of logistics

Perhaps on your next plane trip you won't just be accompanied by excited tourists or business travelers: you could be traveling with a courier carrying a key piece for a technological project or boxes full of products that need to arrive as soon as possible. That's what hand carry is, and we talked about it with the founder of Zenkor Hand Carry Services, one of the companies specialized in this type of cargo.

That afternoon, Walter Guerra left his office, located in the Monraz neighborhood in the northwest of Guadalajara, heading to the airport. Under normal conditions, the trip should take about 45 minutes… but half an hour later they had only gone one kilometer of the 25 they had to travel. The problem was not only the possibility of missing the flight, but Walter was carrying a part that he had promised to deliver as soon as possible when a client had hired his company's services. Something had to be done. And quickly.

“We had to stop a motorcyclist, explain it to him, and ask him to take me to the airport to catch the flight,” he recalls. “I put the part in my backpack and, holding on to the motorcycle while dodging cars, I got to the airport and got on the plane.” It is just one of the many anecdotes that illustrate the challenges of Zenkor, the company founded and run by Walter, who has been doing hand carry for a decade: the cargo service that is sent through a messenger who travels on commercial flights to respond, basically, to urgent delivery needs. It is also known as OBC (on board courier). “We can move from a tiny screw that you practically carry in your hand to boxes and boxes; but on average I would say it goes from four to six regular-sized boxes,” explains Guerra, a 36-year-old Guadalajara native who graduated from the Universidad Panamericana.

What is now Zenkor began as an international trade consultancy, but among its clients they detected an unmet need: the very urgent shipment of merchandise. “They couldn’t find anyone who could serve them quickly enough and it was very expensive for them not to have the materials or how to send them quickly,” he says.

At first they offered the service to freight forwarders and then they turned it into the company’s star product, which forces them to be on the lookout 24/7 and ready for anything. A matter of minutes The biggest challenge in hand carry is the speed that the client needs, which forces them to make quick decisions to resolve crises. For example, one night two couriers had to transport several boxes of auto parts from Querétaro to Chicago.

The flight was due to take off at one in the morning and they arrived at the Mexico City airport an hour and a half early because the cargo had been delivered late. But that was not the only surprise: they had been given the boxes stacked on a pallet and only the top ones had lids, the rest were open. There was no way to get them onto the plane like that and, because of the time, there was no other option than to talk to the other passengers and buy their suitcases. “Imagine people taking their things out of their suitcases and putting them in bags, but they didn’t care, just to earn some extra money,” Walter recalls.

In the end the auto parts landed on time and at seven in the morning they were on the production line. And that ability to make immediate decisions is indispensable every day. They can't spend more than 20 minutes from the time they receive a request until they return the call with the complete solution: verifying origin, destination, dimensions, necessary paperwork; defining who will pick up the shipment, which airline it will go on, who will receive it, in which vehicles, etc.

"As they are super urgent packages, 20 or 30 minutes can make the difference between you getting on a plane or not," Guerra explains. Although there is a price range, the large number of details that must be resolved force each shipment to be different, both in cost and in the solution that is applied. In a few hours the conditions can change completely and, therefore, although the characteristics are identical, the way of solving it will be very different: "It's the same for me to move a small piece as 30 large ones," says the businessman.

Decisions are also based on the best option so that the client's business does not stop. If there is no way to move a large shipment, they adapt the solution: “We take the number of pieces necessary so that the client can continue with their production line on the move and the rest of the boxes are moved as normal air freight and arrive later.” Speed ​​is the key in this business.

Messengers of the 21st century Hand carry would not work without the people who travel all over the world to deliver packages. Couriers are the heirs of the horse messengers who left without stopping until they delivered the letter or package into the recipient's own hand. And although it sounds like one of those ideal jobs that everyone would like to have, it requires special skills. One of them (also a victim of the client's tardiness) found that he could no longer check in his luggage. So he emptied his carry-on bag, threw his clothes in the trash and took the item. And if that were not enough, he got a new outfit... because it was replaced.

“Things like this happen to us that you have to resolve in a matter of minutes in the most unlikely way,” says Walter. And boy, does he have anecdotes: Zenkor has eight employees in operations and all of them have done hand carry to know what it is about and how to react.

In addition, the company has between 80 and 100 couriers in Europe, America and Asia, located in the countries where there is more movement and with the capacity to travel wherever necessary. It has not been easy to gather this group: “They need to meet certain requirements, more than skill, reliability. You can't put an ad in the newspaper asking for couriers,” says Walter. That same requirement must be met by companies that wish to hire the service. They must know that their shipment will be reviewed by Zenkor and, of course, at airports and customs. Clients are duly registered and verified, aware that there are materials that cannot be sent by this means.

And since it is a global service, there is always an extra scare: one of the flights that Walter himself made was on the route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, a few days before that plane was shot down while flying over Ukraine, on June 17, 2014. A global market The growth of industries such as the automotive industry, which in Mexico has received 19 billion dollars in the last five years and hopes to become the sixth largest car manufacturer in the world by 2020, has boosted the hand carry market.

According to an analysis by the aircraft rental and air logistics company Chapman Freeborn, there is an increase in the number of OBC services to our country, driven by the needs of car manufacturers. In fact, the largest hand carry shipment made by this British company in 2015 totaled 4,800 kilos of auto parts, brought from Germany to Mexico by a group of messengers on a commercial flight. Zenkor is no stranger to this trend: “We move a lot of materials within the US that have nothing to do with Mexico, even though the logistics are done here. We even do international services that don't go to our country.”

Another advantage of the hand carry service is the greater care that the packages receive. Thus, it has become an option for sending delicate materials, such as prototypes of electronic devices that cannot be subjected to the rigors of normal cargo transportation.

Source: theinsight.mx