3PL: A Logistics Partner to grow your business

Searching for the best 3PL partner?

Looking for the best 3PL to spend a good portion of your life is not an easy task. Prepare yourself with operational data like it was your own operation. Building trust is difficult but you do have time to know, explore, visit their customers, review their industry knowledge and financial stability.

Some key elements are important to understand:

1) Prepare yourself with a detailed RFQ with detailed data;

It is important to understand your operation particularities, order profile, selling volumes, customers to serve, quality control requirements, network considerations, return policy, internal IT support constraints, customers routing guide and your internal order processing constraints;

2) This process take time, so be prepared;

You will need time to identify, select, negotiate, plan, implement and follow-up this important transition. It is not in weeks but rather months and even years to cover all those important steps;

3) Dedicate your best and experience resources;

You will dedicate a very experience team to support this process. This include: data analysis, customer service, operational logistics, quality control, return manager, IT interfaces ans support, finance, legal, top management. This is not an easy project and working with experience external professionals would contribute to the success of this strategic transition;

4) Define your requirements and search targets;

All 3PL are not created equal, make sure to identify the major points you are looking for in a partner, some key points: geographic coverage (ie: one DC to serve your customers or multiples, etc), experience in your sector (ie: luxury products, Electronics, E-Com, Quality Control, International shipments, etc), Short term space availability, space for futur growth, man power availability, etc

5) Have your legal department ready to play their role;

Ask your legal department to be ready to support your Partner Selection Process. As Logistics project manager, dont underestimate their contribution. As soon as you embark in this process, you will need to sign an NDA or MNDA (Mutual Non-disclosure Agreement) to share information, then a LOI (letter of Intention) to support the solution design phase, then you will negociate a MSA (Master Service Agreement) with all performance Appendix description.

6) Build a detailed transition plan from existing to futur situation;

Now that you have selected your futur 3PL partner, you need to build a detail transition plan. Once again: a dedicated operational transition team, a dedicate IT connexion team, start planning a product and quality control training team, plan inventory consolidation and transfert between sites (including date, lot and open package item), test the new WMS inbound and outbound process, contact suppliers, carriers and customers for your new receiving and shipping adresse, include top manager for any problem to resolve and plan B.

7) Follow-up with expectation, evaluation, communication and forecasting;

You have completed your transition plan, PO are coming in and orders are going out on time. You think your project is finish? No, it is just starting. Your MSA documented your SLA (Service Level Agreement), your evaluation KPI, your quality expectation and finally penalty if KPI are not met. A weekly review meeting will discuss, past week performance, coming week volume and particularities, and KPI review. Operation monitoring and good communication is the key to long term relationship.

Drop me a message, if you do have comments or questions. Having conduct numerous 3PL selection process, I could help you navigate through this important project !!