What does the return via Suez mean for Dutch shippers?
The diversion around the Cape of Good Hope added an average of a week or more to transit times between Asia and Europe. That led to higher freight costs, longer lead times, and harder-to-plan inventories. Now that Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd are bringing one service back through Suez, it may be tempting to shorten planning horizons right away. That would be premature. The carriers themselves are cautious: this concerns one service, not a broad resumption. Shippers who have adjusted their purchasing rhythms, inventory buffers, and transport planning to the longer route risk new disruptions if they switch back too quickly. The lesson of the past eighteen months is precisely that anyone who bases their operation on a single assumption about the route will be caught off guard every time.
Why volatility is structural, not temporary
The return via Suez is positive news, but the pattern of recent years tells a different story. The pandemic, the Suez blockage in 2021, Red Sea attacks in 2023 and 2024, and now a cautious recovery: the international supply chain has faced a different disruption each time. Industry data from the 37th State of Logistics report by Logistics Management (2026) confirms that volatility has become a permanent feature, not a temporary incident. For operations, that means planning on the basis of fixed lead times and stable routes no longer works. You need systems that can rapidly calculate scenarios and that use more current data than a spreadsheet updated once a week.
What goes wrong when data is not in order during a route change?
A route change affects multiple layers at once: purchase orders, inventory management, transport planning, customer communication, and invoicing. In practice, we see at logistics companies and port partners that this information is fragmented: spread across inboxes, PDF confirmations from shipping lines, standalone TMS modules, and manually maintained planning overviews. When a carrier adjusts transit times, a team member has to manually translate that into dozens of customer orders. That takes time and introduces errors. Structured data — where order, planning, and carrier information converge in one system — makes it possible to calculate the impact of a route change directly, without anyone having to go through everything by hand.
How does AI help with faster responses to disruptions?
AI is not a silver bullet here, but it does one thing well: processing large volumes of document information in a structured way that would otherwise require manual handling. Think of booking confirmations, sailing schedules, Bill of Lading documents, and carrier status updates. When that information is automatically read, interpreted, and linked to active orders, planners are left with far more time for the decisions that actually matter: which customer do I inform first, which order has buffer and which does not? The human decides, but the groundwork is already done. That distinction is relevant for port companies and logistics service providers in Rotterdam, precisely because they are the first to feel the consequences of route changes at major carriers.
What does this mean in practice for operations?
Three things are immediately actionable. First: do not assume that the Suez return will quickly become the norm. Build your planning so you can switch between scenarios at short notice. Second: identify where in your operation information is manually retyped from one system to another. Those are the points where you lose the most time with every new disruption. Third: consider whether your current systems — TMS, WMS, or a combination of spreadsheets — provide the agility you need when the route changes again. Not every company needs to replace its core system; sometimes a targeted AI layer on top of existing tools is enough to structure the data flows. But for companies that find their systems are consistently unable to keep up with complexity, the right moment to take a thorough look is now, not after the next disruption.