Hiring a third-party logistics, or 3PL, provider should bring a sense of relief. If your organization has been handling fulfillment in-house, you’ve probably outgrown your ability to be reliable and accurate, and entrusting your increasingly complicated inventory management and shipping needs to professionals takes a huge burden off your plate.
In fact, that relief may be so great that it causes you to overlook a few things that might be a little concerning to you. If your new 3PL provider is showing signs of being less than professional in some areas, or if their facility looks a little sketchy to you, those seemingly small issues could come back later on to become huge problems.
Here’s why you shouldn’t sign that contract until you’re confident that your new logistics partner will be able to handle all your business completely and dependably. Spectra is the kind of fulfillment company that inspires that confidence, and our client testimonials from the past 20+ years show that their confidence is well placed!
Mistakes in Receiving
The internal shortcomings at a 3PL company often become evident during the first phase of the fulfillment process: receiving. This is the moment that a truck backs up to the loading dock at the fulfillment facility and the driver meets a member of the 3PL company’s team to unload.
That process should be efficient, well planned, and organized, but in many cases it’s the opposite. If the team didn’t plan adequately for the load to be delivered at the designated time, there may be no one available to unload the items, conduct quality and accuracy checks, and log everything into inventory right away. Instead, someone figures out where the load can go in the receiving area so that the driver can unload and pull away from the dock as soon as possible. The philosophy at work is, “We’ll deal with it later when we have time.”
Those famous last words inevitably lead to mistakes. If there are any issues with the pallets of materials being received, no one will know about it until the driver is long gone. That makes the resolution of the problem a much longer, more difficult, and more expensive process.
Disorganization Equals Waste
The other huge problem with this disorganized approach is that it creates an ideal environment for lost inventory. Items that are pushed to the side until someone else is able to inspect and log them properly tend to get lost. A warehouse is filled with hundreds of shelves, pallets, and brown cardboard boxes that all look very similar. Leaving a pallet where it doesn’t belong leads to a chain reaction of mistakes. Someone needs that spot for another client’s items, so they move it a little farther away. It’s now blocking a forklift’s route, so someone else puts it on a nearby shelf.
Before long, the team member responsible for logging the inventory has no chance of finding it quickly. People have to stop what they’re doing and hunt high and low for the lost load, wasting time and energy on a problem caused by disorganization. In the worst case scenario, the items could be damaged because whoever shifted them around wasn’t aware of their fragility, temperature parameters, or other factors that require special care.
Structure and Experience Equal Savings
In the fulfillment industry, efficiency is directly tied to savings. Efficiency, in turn, is created through structure and experience. The more a team knows about what to expect, how to plan for it, and how to make sure the right people are in place for each upcoming task, the more efficiently the process takes place.
Consider the opposite of the receiving scenario that we presented earlier. When the driver arrives at the loading dock, he is immediately met by a team member who knows exactly what is being delivered, what it looks like, how many units there should be, and what condition they should be in. The load is placed in a designated spot on the floor, where the initial inspection can be conducted quickly. If there are any questions about the load, they can be addressed to the driver right away and the answers can be found.
Once the driver is on his way, the items are quickly entered into the client’s inventory, and they can be placed on the shelf in the correct spot. Just like that, the receiving process is complete and no one will have to follow up later to find out what went wrong and how it can be fixed.
How Do You Know What’s Happening?
As a client of a 3PL provider, you’d like to know what is happening with your inventory during receiving, inventory management, and shipping. That’s not always the way it goes in reality. But when you work with Spectra, you enjoy a very high degree of visibility by way of our online portal. Through this portal, you can see what you have in stock, when it arrives at our facility, when it is shipped out, and how much is left in our warehouse. Best of all, everything is updated in real time, so you can make decisions based on updated information, not data that is several days or weeks old.
As the first step in fulfillment, receiving needs to be done right, or the following steps are all affected. The end result is wasted money for the client, as damaged or lost inventory has to be replaced. Another negative outcome is frustration for the customers at the end of the B2C or B2B fulfillment chain, whose deliveries are delayed due to problems at the fulfillment facility.
If you’d like to learn more about Spectra, our experienced fulfillment team, and the processes we use to give maximum visibility to our clients as we handle their inventory, book a free consultation with us today. We love introducing people to our way of doing fulfillment, and we would love to discuss how it can benefit your organization and your customers.
