Client Name

Maersk Pakistan

Faculty Advisor

Dr. Saqib Sharif

SBS Thought Leadership Areas

Entrepreneurship and Innovation

SBS Thought Leadership Area Justification

The bonded trucking workstream sits squarely within Entrepreneurship and Innovation because it is not an incremental tweak to an existing service but the design of a new commercial product for the Pakistani logistics market: an insurance-style capacity-protection offering that had not been offered before. The team went through the full entrepreneurial cycle of identifying a real exporter pain point (stranded mango cargo during peak season), validating it through stakeholder interviews with carriers, forwarders, bonded operators and Pakistan Customs, designing the product, pricing it, building its economics, and engaging the regulator whose buy-in determines whether it can launch. The innovation lies in the structure itself: reframing an unsolved logistics problem as an insurable risk and applying a premium-and-claims model in a space where it has never been used.

The project also touches Investment Decision Making as a secondary area, since the financial model, break-even analysis, sensitivity testing and the comparison against an actuarially fair premium together amount to a conditional investment appraisal for Maersk Pakistan.

Aligned SDGs

GOAL 12: Responsible Consumption and Production

Aligned SDGs Justification

This project aligns most directly with SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production), specifically Target 12.3 on reducing food losses along production and supply chains. The bonded trucking product is, at its core, a food-loss-prevention mechanism. During Pakistan's May to August mango season, a structural mismatch between perishable cargo offered for export and available belly capacity out of Lahore means customs-cleared shipments are routinely bumped from flights, stored beyond their shelf life, or destroyed outright. By unlocking stranded capacity through bonded inter-airport movement to airports like Islamabad, Multan, Sialkot and Peshawar where uplift is available, the product allows mangoes to reach their destination markets in saleable condition rather than being downgraded or discarded. Every tonne of fruit that reaches its market instead of being lost is a quantifiable reduction in post-harvest loss, directly advancing the responsible-production agenda within one of Pakistan's most economically significant perishable export streams.

NDA

Yes

Abstract

This Experiential Learning Project is a five-month engagement (Jan to May 2026) between a four-member IBA team and A.P. Moller, Maersk Pakistan, structured around two parallel workstreams. The first was the design and feasibility assessment of a new commercial product: a bonded inter-airport trucking service framed as an insurance type capacity-protection solution for perishable exporters during the May to August mango season. The second was a process-reengineering study of Maersk Pakistan's air export and air import processes against the Maersk Global Air Standard (AMS v1.2) and IATA frameworks.

The work combined primary qualitative research with quantitative financial modelling and structured process analysis. Six stakeholder groups were engaged including three international carriers, a freight forwarder, a bonded trucking operator and Pakistan Customs, with two operating facilities visited to validate documented procedures. A bottom-up financial model was built using a bonded trucking rate card, and two gap analyses were generated by comparing locally validated as-is maps with the global standard, alongside reengineered to-be process maps for both flows.

The key results are: bonded inter-airport movement has real commercial demand but is highly sensitive to speed; Pakistan Customs procedural friction (not infrastructure or capital) is the binding constraint on the product; and bonded-capacity-protection is financially viable under base assumptions, delivering a positive operating margin while providing material net savings for exporters. Operationally, significant gaps were identified between local and global air processes, most notably in customer and vendor master data, compliance screening, credit control, and the absence of a structured key performance indicator framework. The reengineered to-be maps close these gaps while preserving Pakistan's local strengths. The report concludes with a conditional recommendation to proceed with the bonded trucking pilot subject to securing written customs facilitation, and a phased roadmap for adopting the reengineered air processes.

Keywords: Bonded trucking, air freight, perishable exports, process reengineering, gap analysis, feasibility study, Maersk Pakistan, mango season, capacity protection, customs facilitation.

Document Type

Restricted Access

Document Name for Citation

Experiential Learning Project

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