Case Study: Unilever achieves real-time cross-border visibility and reduced border delays with FourKites

How FourKites Helped Unilever South Africa Overcome Border Delays in a Pandemic

Unilever, the multinational consumer goods company, faced severe cross-border delays in South Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic—average border wait times jumped from 4–6 hours to more than 10—threatening on-time delivery and straining carrier and customer communications. To gain predictive ETAs, reduce manual tracking work and improve collaboration, Unilever South Africa partnered with FourKites and began integrating FourKites’ real-time transportation visibility platform (running on AWS) in 2019.

FourKites integrated with Unilever’s TMS, onboarded carriers, and deployed capabilities like Secure Shipments, Notifications & Alerts and Custom Geofence zones around border crossings to trigger alerts on delays and provide real-time ETAs and CoD timestamps. The deployment delivered measurable impact: Unilever achieved visibility on 80% of shipments by September 2020, received more than 2,500 targeted elevated-wait-time notifications, reduced outbound calls and manual data collection, and improved carrier performance, customer communication and operational responsiveness.

Unilever