The global supply chain has undergone a huge transformation in the past decade. As a result, the 3PL industry has started to rise up and offer more features and services to fulfill the needs of the changing industry.

Some key requirements that many brands are looking for are:
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• Transparency and communication – When outsourcing inventory management, order fulfillment, and other facets of a company’s logistics process, it’s important to keep strong lines of communication open to maintain a healthy 3PL / client relationship. A vendor portal can help to simplify this process and keep clients happy.
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• Meeting key metrics and KPIs – Some common measurements of 3PL success are on-time delivery, accurate order fulfillment, real-time stock availability and accuracy. Meeting these metrics and being able to report against these KPIs demonstrates the reliability of your 3PL service offerings.
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• Value and cost-effective services – Clients don’t want to worry about their inventory as it sits in your facilities so good inventory management and transparency are very important. Order fulfillment needs to be cost-effective for clients and by focusing on efficiency or lowering shipping costs your clients will realize the true value of your 3PL services.
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• Flexibility – Some clients may have more advanced requirements like kitting or assembly services, lot & expiration date management of inventory, serial number tracking, or data availability for 3rd party systems like ERPs. Having these capabilities allows you to provide robust and flexible services offering for potential clients. Our 3PL platform offers out-of-the-box efficiency with core 3PL competencies but also a robust feature set so you can take on more diverse clients.

A 3rd party logistics company, also known as 3PL, is a company that provides warehousing and distribution services to other organizations. In the past, many companies had their own warehouses and distribution centers. But in recent years, the trend has been to outsource these services to a 3PL.

The reasons for this are two-fold. First, as a result of technological advances and changing economic conditions, it has become less expensive to outsource these services. And second, with the advent of e-commerce, companies need to think about their distribution networks in a new way. For example, companies are now no longer limited to their own warehouses for storing inventory. They can now store their products in multiple locations, which allows for more flexibility in fulfillment and supply chain.

A 4PL is a logistics services provider who is able to offer a mixture of services utilizing their own logistics facilities and others that are well integrated into a logistics network. The benefit of working with a 4PL is the ability to deploy a large network that better benefits from economies of scale to lower logistics costs. A 4PL is managed by an expert logistics management company that is able to provide a reliable and homogenous logistics experience leveraging a group of logistics partners.

There are software platforms, like Shipedge that have the ability to help manage some of the more challenging aspects of this process like centralized stock availability, inventory insights across a network, distribution of products across many facilities, financial accounting for services provided by various groups, and more.

A 3PL warehouse management system is a software system that a company uses to manage inventory, distribution, and order fulfillment for various 3PL clients.

This system is used by both companies that outsource their warehouse operations to a 3PL company and the logistics company that is providing third-party logistics services to those companies (clients).

The Shipege 3PL platform includes a 3pl warehouse management system that is commonly used by third-party logistics companies to manage operations. This system is used to track the inventory of clients, facilitate order fulfillment or distribution workflows, ship orders via parcel carriers or trucking companies, and track costs for billing purposes along the way.