Menzies Digitizes Truck Scheduling at Prague and Vancouver Cargo Hubs

Menzies Aviation has gone live with Nallian's Truck Visit Management (TVM) platform at its air cargo operations in Prague and Vancouver, the first two stations in a global rollout announced in October 2025 that will reach Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland in January 2027. Once those five locations are running, the initial deployment will cover sites handling more than 500,000 metric tons of cargo annually.

The platform does a specific job: it lets trucking companies reserve arrival slots in advance, while giving cargo warehouse personnel clearer visibility of expected vehicle movements. It also handles driver and vehicle validation and coordinated yard management — the unglamorous mechanics that decide whether a freight terminal runs smoothly or seizes up at peak hours.

Why truck scheduling matters

Air cargo terminals live and die by yard discipline. When trucks queue without appointments, warehouse staff juggle arrivals by phone and guesswork, handovers slow down, and congestion spills onto airport roads. Menzies says the TVM platform improves communication among trucking companies, freight forwarders and warehouse teams, with three stated aims:

• reduce congestion at cargo facilities
• minimize truck waiting times
• improve cargo handovers during peak operating periods

Those are operational targets, not certified performance figures — the company has not published before-and-after dwell-time data from Prague or Vancouver. What is verifiable is the deployment footprint and the timeline attached to it.

How it plugs into MACH

The TVM platform is integrated with Menzies Aviation Cargo Handling (MACH), the company's cloud-based cargo management system developed with Wipro. MACH is already deployed at 53 Menzies locations, which gives the truck-management rollout a substantial installed base to expand into beyond the five sites named so far.

The integration matters for a practical reason: warehouse and yard personnel get a shared, real-time view of truck activity. Instead of the yard and the warehouse floor working from separate pictures of what is arriving and when, both see the same data — slot bookings, vehicle validation, expected movements.

Beau Paine, executive president of cargo at Menzies Aviation — the role is executive vice president of cargo — said the technology is intended to reduce manual coordination while improving operational predictability and safety. Jean Verheyen, CEO of Nallian, said the Prague and Vancouver deployments demonstrate how the platform can be adapted to cargo operations with different local requirements.

Verheyen's point is the one to watch. Prague and Vancouver are mid-sized cargo operations by global standards; Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland will test whether the same slot-booking and yard-management model holds under different regulatory environments and trucking-market structures in Australasia.

What is flying, what is promised

Separating the record from the roadmap: the platform is live at two airports today. The January 2027 extension to Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland is planned, not delivered, and the 500,000-tonne annual figure describes the cargo volume across the five initial locations rather than a throughput gain attributable to the software.

For ground handlers, the economics are straightforward. Waiting trucks cost trucking companies money and terminal aprons and docks are fixed assets — anything that spreads arrivals across the day raises the effective capacity of infrastructure that cannot be quickly expanded. Menzies, one of the largest ground handlers worldwide, is betting that digital scheduling scales cheaper than concrete.

The next milestone on the calendar is the Australasia phase in January 2027, when the rollout's ability to adapt to five distinct airport environments — and its measurable effect on truck dwell times — will face its first real test.