Lufthansa Cargo’s 24x7 reliability for warehouse mobility

Discover how Lufthansa Cargo worked with Lufthansa Industry Solutions and Ericsson to set up a private 5G network for scanners and digitalization efforts.

Lufthansa Cargo is one of the world's leading cargo airlines, serving about 350 destinations worldwide in about 100 countries, and transporting an average of 2,500 tons daily. The company continually considers and chooses wide-ranging technologies to improve efficiency and safety, with most of those digital tools requiring a key but often challenging service: uninterrupted wireless connectivity that keeps both fixed and mobile devices running smoothly 24x7.

At Lufthansa Cargo’s warehouse at LAX airport in Los Angeles, various technologies help the team serve customers with dependable storage and handling of different kinds of cargo, including temperature-sensitive materials.

Perhaps the company’s most important on-premises tool is the handheld Zebra barcode scanners that workers use to track items in the warehouse, as well as during the loading and unloading process. The scanners are relied on throughout the 100,000 square feet of warehouse space and the apron outside the facility.

The workers move around constantly, both on foot and aboard forklifts. Lufthansa Cargo had been connecting these scanners via a Wi-Fi network, but the connectivity was very unreliable. Wi-Fi isn’t ideal for highly mobile digital use cases, mostly because roaming between many, many access points often leads to lag and downtime.

To make matters worse, every time the scanners would lose connectivity for even 1 second — an extremely frequent occurrence — the employees operating them had to initiate a manual reauthentication process that included their credentials.
“What should be a 30-second task can easily become 3 to 5 minutes. The most important number for us is time — and time is money,” said Mario Schwarz, Operations Manager, Lufthansa Cargo.

“Every minute that we don't have connectivity creates a huge backlog. When this happens, we can’t serve our customers. They have a bad perception of the service that we are delivering. More than just a monetary price tag, this loss of trust hinders the great service perception that Lufthansa Cargo has built,” said Stephanie Abeler, VP Americas, Lufthansa Cargo.

The frequent Wi-Fi downtime was forcing the company to fall back on laborious hand-written paper documentation on the warehouse floor. From scanner downtime to time-intensive manual backup plans, the challenges of Wi-Fi in large, complex warehouse environments were creating a chain reaction of inefficiency that wasn’t viable for Lufthansa Cargo.

The company turned to its IT consulting subsidiary, Lufthansa Industry Solutions, for help selecting and deploying a solution that would meet its ongoing wireless networking needs not only at LAX, but also in its warehouses at other airports.

Private cellular arose as a natural option, given its performance consistency and low latency, even for highly mobile devices and applications. They performed a proof of concept (POC) of Ericsson Private 5G at the LAX site, testing the solution for nearly a year. They used free CBRS spectrum instead of licensed spectrum through a specific network operator.

With the performance of Ericsson Private 5G meeting the company’s uptime and reliability requirements for day-to-day operations, Lufthansa Cargo eventually fully deployed its private 5G network. Only two of Ericsson’s powerful, industry-leading radios were needed to cover the entire facility — a welcome departure from the bloated set of 17 access points necessary for the legacy Wi-Fi network.

Along with Zebra scanners, Lufthansa Cargo began using the private 5G network for other high-value technologies, including:

• Tablets for staff mobility
• Mobile stations for on-site U.S. U.S. Customs and Border Protection workers
• Push-to-talk devices for 2-way communications
• Sensors and other IoT devices for operations visibility

Lufthansa Cargo also used the private network to connect its new dimensioner — an automated digital visualization system. Forklifts drive into an area where a system of video cameras, sensors, and scales measures the dimensions of specific cargo. The system then recommends the optimal position in which to load that cargo onto the aircraft  

Connection stability for ample mobility improves operational efficiency
Since replacing Wi-Fi with Ericsson Private 5G, Lufthansa Cargo now has a cohesive network that does not require constant roaming between APs. Private 5G keeps the warehouse’s digital tech connected 24x7 — with the impact being felt from operations to employee and customer satisfaction.

Even if a device were to disconnect for some reason, Lufthansa Cargo’s scanners no longer require manual reauthentication; all of this is done automatically within the private 5G core. Thus, in the event of a disconnection, the application would restart immediately.

All of this factors into employee experience and retention. Staff on the shop floor at the LAX site have more confidence than ever in the scanners and other technologies that have become essential in their day-to-day work — rendering paper logs unnecessary and eliminating availability gaps.
 
Simplified, efficient network management through a full-stack solution
With Ericsson’s full-stack solution, which includes a cloud-based management platform, and with the experience of Lufthansa Industry Solutions, the warehouse has a private network that can be monitored from anywhere and adjusted quickly. If a challenge arises or a new need emerges, Lufthansa Cargo can respond with efficiency — saving time and money.

Flexibility and scalability for future innnovation
As Lufthansa Cargo looks to add new efficiency- and safety-focused technologies at the LAX warehouse, the company knows it has the reliability, bandwidth, and network control to balance all of its connected devices without sacrificing performance.

Also, as Lufthansa Cargo plans potential private 5G deployments now and in future years, it has a highly replicable template to work from — with ample untapped Ericsson Private 5G features available to meet unique site-specific needs while mitigating unnecessary expansion costs.