The air cargo market is experiencing momentous developments that may impact strongly on future trends. A consolidation shift has been observed, by more integration of the supply chain. Integrators engage in forwarding, forwarding agents operate their own aircraft and airlines bypass the forwarding agents, by striking direct structural deals with major customers. This last development in the field of the air cargo road feeder service (RFS) is also known as Direct Trucking Pick-up (DTP). In the current air cargo business models, all cargo is delivered via a freight forwarder to combination carriers (carrying both passengers and cargo). In the existing organizational cargo structures, there is no direct link from customer to combination carriers. The traditional model of air-cargo transportation, has been challenged in recent years. This stresses the need for research regarding the green field of the DTP model, researched in this thesis. It is important for the combination air cargo carriers to consider how to deal with future competition. Using several theories, such as lean manufacturing and transaction cost economics (TCE), the performance of the current state of an in-depth case study for KLM Cargo was analysed. Based on the measurements and analysis, several problems were identified and a framework had to be developed as a test platform to test several improvement scenarios. Using the discrete event simulation tool Simio, a model was created serving as a test platform. Simulation was used to explore various opportunities of process improvements and the impact of the proposed changes before implementation. The 5 proposed improvement scenarios were tested using the test platform. It can be concluded that all scenarios improve / enhance the DTP supply chain.

In recent years, the playing field of KLM Cargo has become increasingly dynamic and competitive. To remain competitive, KLM Cargo has to improve the delivery performance of the cargo in terms of timeliness and overall quality of the cargo (such as quality of the documentation, packaging, labeling and checks performed), which will reduce re-work / correction costs. Using the method of in-depth case study for the trade lane Denmark – Amsterdam, the current situation is analyzed, identifying the bottlenecks in the supply chain of the cargo. For the identified bottlenecks, structural solutions are designed, implemented and monitored for the specific case of Billund and Copenhagen. The bottlenecks identified are the acceptance procedure, trucking schedule, data communication all having an effect on the arrival performance at the Amsterdam hub. The newly implemented solutions result in an increase in the arrival performance of 30%. However, to increase the arrival performance to the desired level, continuous improvement on all 3 areas is needed.