The shortage of secure truck parking areas is not unique to South Africa – and it’s been an issue of focus for theTransported Asset Protection Association (Tapa) for some time.
Adding muscle to its mandate – to reduce cargo theft and increase supply chain resilience in the Europe, Middle East & Africa (EMEA) – is a new partnership with Bosch Secure Truck Parking, a digital booking platform for truck parking spaces. According to Tapa, in Europe it has contributed to a 42.9% growth in the Association’s database of secure parking places in the last 12 months.
Tapa’s Parking Security requirement (PSR), designed by its manufacturer and logistics service provider members, is an industry standard which was launched in 2019 to help the Association’s members identify secure parking places in the region which met their security needs. Product losses from vehicles left in unsecured parking locations accounted for 53.8% of the 8 548 cargo thefts recorded by Tapa’s Incident Information Service (IIS) last year. Crimes were recorded in 48 countries across the region, with a value of more than £137 million for the 39.1% of these incidents sharing financial data.
Tapa’s PSR programme now covers over 6 700 secure parking places at 63 sites in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain and the United Kingdom. The organisation hopes to increase this number to 15 000 by the end of 2020 to help meet growing demand. According to estimates, Europe alone has a shortage of 400 000 secure parking spaces for trucks.
Bosch Secure Truck Parking operates a network of around 50 secure truck parking locations across Europe in Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. New sites in Romania and Sweden will be added soon. Under its commitment to Tapa’s PSR, the first two sites in Germany have already adopted partner status. In addition to its online portal for secure parking, Bosch operates one of Europe’s largest monitoring centres for cargo theft prevention as part of its portfolio of solutions, which also include video cameras with intelligent video analytics.