Shipping delays, Shipping delays, along with increased shipments, Covid related staffing problems, container availability problems, port and trucking issues are combining to make the end of 2020 a logistics nightmare. The industry is now predicting these problems will persist through Q1 2021. We recommend that, for planning purposes, you allow an extra 3 – 4 weeks for international shipments.
Hillebrand Cybersecurity Incident. As many of you may have heard, Hillebrand was the subject of a cybersecurity incident and was forced to take their operations down as of Monday, December 14th. There have been several issues as a result of this on our services:
- Purchase Orders have not been updating in our system with revised ETAs. This has largely affected our west coast orders where there are long delays due to port congestion.
- Hillebrand is slowly working on collecting orders from last week and this week but with their internal system not entirely up and running yet it will take time to work through the backlog of orders.
- Updates in our system are going to be done manually as we receive updated reports from Hillebrand.
- Any containers that were previously booked should be sailing on time.
- Freight shipments from Italy are not affected as we currently use a different freight forwarder for this route.
Hillebrand is working on rebuilding their internal systems so they can resume normal business operations which should be completed soon. After that they will focus on their outward facing data mechanisms which will return up to date visibility on orders. The anticipated date for these services to come back online is the first week of January.
We appreciate your patience as our vendor works through this issue and please let us know if you have any questions.