COVID-19 impact on logistics — Sixfold publishes real-time information on border crossing times

UPDATE: The blog post was written before a number of countries introduced mandatory border checks. With these border checks a large number of suppliers in Europe temporarily saw significant disruptions with their deliveries due to unprecedented queues at EU-borders. As of today (March 24), the situation has improved again, but should be closely monitored. We will be publishing a more detailed report examining border closure impact on the supply chains in the future. Preliminary analyses suggests that last week (Mar 16-22) the number of delayed cross-border deliveries rose significantly in countries with stricter border controls.

Our day-to-day work at Sixfold is providing our customers — globally acting manufacturers, retailers, and logistics service providers — with real-time & predictive visibility over their shipments. We help them understand where their shipments are, when they are arriving at their own facilities or the customers' doorsteps and, crucially, whether there are problems or delays.

Enter the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. Over the last few weeks, European nations have been working hard to contain the spread of the pandemic. Governments have applied restrictions not only on public gatherings and individual travel but, by setting up border patrols or even closures, have indirectly impacted cargo flows. Our customers have been consulting with us about how to best handle the situation, since many of them provide crucial products that keep our society going.

Data of millions of shipments on our platform shows that even though there are disruptions, the delays are actually not as bad as one might expect. Based on our data, on-time delivery overall only dropped by 3-7 percentage points in affected areas over the last week (depending on regions and industries). This shows that the highly professional logistics service providers as well as logistics departments of our customers have processes in place to handle crisis situations. Moreover, real-time data & insights have enabled them to take fact-based, quick, and efficient decisions in regards to transporting their goods. They have managed to re-route transports and shift scarce resources from less important transports to the crucial ones and thereby have kept service levels up despite the unusual circumstances.

Seeing the impact that we’ve had with helping our customers, we've decided that we need to take these learnings and do everything in our power to help the general public. Thus, as a first step, we have published aggregated information on border crossing times for trucks, based on our real-time & predictive data, so that everyone who has a practical use for it can access it for free. If you are working in supply chain and this helps you get your goods to where they need to be with shorter delays – here you go. If you are a carrier or truck driver hauling food, this is for you. If you are a government official or a journalist and have some use for it, please use it.

Access the border crossing times live map here: https://covid-19.sixfold.com

We provide the information for free to help out the public and are happy to be of assistance. Please reach out to us in case you have any more ideas, comments and suggestions how we might be of additional help.

Contact us at covid19@sixfold.com in case of questions.

We treat privacy and data security with utmost gravity. The data used for calculating the border wait times is aggregated across tens of thousands of shipments and fully anonymised to protect the business interests and privacy of both our customers and their carriers fulfilling their deliveries.