Five questions with…Andy Haylar

In the first edition of our Five Questions With series, Andy Haylar, Global e-Commerce & Technology Director at Air Business, shares his perspective on the changing world of international logistics – from navigating customs and evolving customer expectations to using technology and data to remove complexity and create more predictable delivery experiences.

Question 1.

You’ve spent almost 20 years in logistics and technology. What’s changed the most?

Technology is, of course, the answer. I’d say that in my line of work, but it’s true. It used to be a cost line/blackhole that kept operations ticking over. Now it’s the engine of the organisation, and often the thing that decides whether a business can grow at all. You can’t enter a new market, win a new client or handle the Christmas peak without the systems to support it.

It has also changed what customers expect. Speed and cost still matter, but we underestimated how much people value certainty. A taxi app’s little map doesn’t get you home any quicker, but it makes the wait easier. Parcel tracking does the same.

The change I find most striking, though, is one few people see: the data now travels ahead of the parcel. Goods are increasingly cleared on information sent in advance, often before the plane lands. Perfect data sails through. A vague description sits in a warehouse, however fast it was flown. We’re in the business of moving accurate information about boxes, and the box follows.

Question 2.

What challenge do organisations face when expanding internationally?

Sometimes people’s perception is to think the hard part is getting the parcel there. It usually isn’t. The hard part is everything nobody warned them about: customs forms, duty, a courier who won’t deliver to flats, returns policies that make sense at home and cost a fortune abroad.
There’s a psychological trap too. Most customers will accept paying duty. What they won’t tolerate is a surprise bill on the doorstep. Same money, completely different reaction. So the job isn’t only to make shipping cheaper. It’s to make it predictable.

Businesses also underestimate how often the ground moves. Expansion is rarely a neat, step-by-step plan. Rules change halfway through, and you have to adapt while still trading.

And regulation is often a blunt instrument, written to fix one problem and applied to everyone. The EU’s new €3 duty on low-value parcels is aimed at ultra-cheap goods from a handful of huge marketplaces. But because it’s charged per item type rather than per parcel a small retailer’s mixed order can pay more duty than one expensive item. The intention is sensible. The side effects land on the wrong people. The retailers who coped this summer were the ones whose product data was already in order.

Question 3.

What role should technology play in logistics and e-Commerce?

The best logistics technology is the kind the customer never notices. If a shopper has to think about tariff codes or which carrier covers their postcode, something has gone wrong somewhere upstream.

There’s a tendency in our industry to measure progress by adding features. I’d rather measure it by the number of things our clients no longer have to worry about. That’s the thinking behind Consero. It takes carriers, customs data and tracking that would normally live in six different places and puts them in one.

It also means being honest about what matters. A clear, accurate delivery date often does more for a customer than knocking a day off the delivery time. People forgive slow. They rarely forgive unpredictable.

Question 4.

What’s the best professional advice you’ve ever received?

“Don’t gravitate to what you’re good at, or what’s easy.”

It’s tempting to stick to what you already do well, because it’s comfortable and it gets results. But the easy path rarely leads anywhere new. The advice was to keep challenging myself and keep innovating, even when it would be simpler not to.

I’ve found the biggest opportunities often sit inside the biggest problems: the rules nobody understands, the process that always goes wrong. That’s where the value is, precisely because most people avoid it. Every regulatory change that gives our clients a headache is also a chance to build something that takes it away.

That’s a big part of why I love technology. It can turn a problem into an opportunity, and it can solve problems people didn’t realise they had. Finding that chink in the armour, the small change nobody else has spotted, is often where a genuinely commercial opportunity comes from…plus its fun!

I should probably apologise to my development team here. They regularly end up with their heads in their hands, trying to make sense of my latest hare-brained idea. The brilliant part is that they usually find a way to make it real.

Question 5.

Looking ahead, what excites you most about the future of e-Commerce?

What excites me is that no one can map it out.

Logistics is not a straight line. Barely a week goes by without something new: a regulation that changes the rules overnight, e-commerce giants merging or pulling out of markets, AI rewriting how whole processes work. I could give you a confident prediction, but the road ahead has plenty of forks, and I like not knowing which one we’ll take.

Some of the forks are strange. Will we one day 3D print goods locally instead of flying them around the world? Then only the data travels, which is an unsettling thought for a logistics business, and a fascinating one.

Some run against intuition. I suspect slower delivery will become a choice people happily make, because it’s cheaper or feels greener, while certainty becomes the thing they’ll pay more for. Returns could become as important as deliveries.

What I’m surest of is the opportunity for postal operators. They already have what money can’t easily buy: trust, and a van on every street. With the right technology, they can compete for international retail rather than just delivering it.

Whichever fork we take, that’s the problem I want to be working on.