Indonesia changed the rules again

Indonesia changed the rules again. That sentence is not a surprise if you've moved goods there for any length of time. This time the reason is bigger than a customs mood. PSBB. Large-scale social restrictions. The kind of policy that is about people staying home, which sounds simple until you remember that parcels are moved by people who were told to stay home.

April has a particular flavour. Origin still wants to ship. Buyers still want the thing, especially now. The street in between is negotiating with a government about what counts as essential, who can be outside, and whether your carton is a good or a problem. The tracker does not have a status for that.

The rule change is not the interruption. The interruption is every SOP that assumed last month's street.

What actually breaks

Not the idea of logistics. The last mile. Depots that can't roster the usual way. Riders who can't move through a neighbourhood the way they did in March. COD, which needs a door to open and cash to change hands, colliding with a door that isn't supposed to open for strangers. Failed deliveries that used to be a retry and are now a policy question.

Customs and domestic movement get new questions too. Can this go. Under what category. With what letter. I am not going to pretend I have a neat matrix. The neat matrix is what gets you in trouble, because it freezes a morning's rumour into an afternoon's process. The useful posture is: we check today, we write down what we were told, we do not tender on a guess, we tell the customer which of those we are in.

Singapore, from here, can look calm in a way that's unhelpful. You can still pack. You can still talk like a regional operator. The destination is not a concept. It's a city under rules that changed this month, and will change again, because that's how this year is going.

Do not run Indonesia on a Singapore clock

I have said this when the emergency was ordinary. It's louder now. A copied SOP that says "out for delivery, then delivered, then COD reconciled" is a children's drawing of a market that currently has checkpoints in it. If your team is chasing timestamps that cannot exist, they will harass partners, lie to customers, or both.

Rewrite the clock. What is a reasonable sit. What is a true failed attempt versus a restriction. Who is allowed to hold at origin instead of flying into a street that cannot receive. Holding is not failure. Flying into a closed door is.

Asset-light means we do not control the riders. We control whether we brief the truth. If a partner says they can still deliver, I want to know how, in which zones, for which goods, with what proof. "We can" is not a brief. "We can in these conditions" is.

Customers still deserve a sentence

Buyers in Indonesia are not an abstraction. They're people at home, some of them more dependent on a parcel than they were in January. Brands want to keep selling. I get it. Selling into a restriction without a delivery sentence is how you create a customer service pile that ops cannot shovel.

The sentence can be slow. It cannot be fake. Here's what we can move. Here's what we're holding. Here's when we'll know more. If COD is the commercial model, say what happens when the door can't complete the dance. Don't discover it from a rider who left and a buyer who says they never saw anyone.

A rule change is a process event. Treat it like a new lane, not like a delay on the old one.

We will do this again

Not because I enjoy saying that. Because Indonesia, and this region, will keep issuing versions. PSBB will have extra letters, extra cities, extra exceptions for extra categories. If your operation needs a week of shock every time, you don't have an Indonesia process. You have a Singapore process that visits Jakarta when the news is quiet.

Write the questions down. Who confirms the street is open. Who confirms the goods are allowed. Who talks to the brand. Who has authority to stop a tender. That's the SOP. The answers will keep moving. The questions can sit still, which is the closest thing to calm I can offer this month.

I'm not forecasting. I'm refusing to run last month's delivery story as if the street didn't change. The street changed. Update the file.