The most important questions concering supply, people, and logistics

The health and safety of our customers and employees remains our top priority.
Therefore we’ve started precautionary measures according to recommendations from the WHO as sanitisation of our offices, the provision of essential hygiene products at workplaces, voluntary quarantine on a early stage and introduced working in two seperate shifts for both offices in Hamburg and Wageningen already two weeks before.
As a final step for prevention we’ve transferred March 19th, the whole team of 130 people into an Remote-Home-Office-mode.

According to our proactive prevention measurements actually no one of our team is infected or supposed to be.
Our services run continously without significant limitations based on our proven tools and platforms as Blue Jeans Video-Conferecing, Microsoft Dynamics ERP and Salesforce CRM.

The travel restriction between 26 countries in Europe and the US, becoming effective 11.59 p.m. Eastern Time US on March 13, has, for the time being, no significant impact on transatlantic cargo movements as it does not apply to cargo.
In order to manage the relations with our supplier we’ve a longtime routine in using video-conference-systems.

The spread of COVID-19 occurs through direct and unprotected contact with an infected person. There have been no reported cases of cargo-to-human transmission.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has advised, “Currently there is no evidence to support the transmission of COVID-19 associated with imported goods”.

Additionally, the World Health Organization (WHO) mentions that “The likelihood of an infected person contaminating commercial goods is low and the risk of catching the virus that causes COVID-19 from a package that has been moved, travelled, and exposed to different conditions and temperature is also low.”

Actually we try to supply minimum the regular demand and as more as possible according to the processing capacities of our partners.
Actually Bösch Boden Spies has no own warehouse capacities for stockbuilding volumes without any specific order. For the future we will evaluate further opportunities for ensuring supply in such a challenging situation.

Based on a high level of automatisation – especially in the plants of our US- and Canada based suppliers – the number of people which are necessary for running operations is limited.

In respect of the magnitude of the COVID-19 effect, our suppliers are executing new and continuous risk assessments, business impact analysis and implementing new measures into their business continuity framework based on alert levels. Standard processes have also been defined in case of staff being infected or exposed to people who are infected.

Our supplying partners in North America expect for their harvest season beginning september a again normalized situation.
Our other suppliers like for example in Spain are truly challenged by the demand for foreign harvest workers who have just left these countries. They actually try to compensate this gap by local people.