3PL Business Processes

Enhancing your business processes with Infoware

Your processes are your business. This makes robust and efficient processes non-negotiable for long-term growth and business continuity.

When it comes to a 3PL business, accuracy and visibility of stock with enhanced productivity is the minimum baseline for you to stand out as a reliable business partner. When your processes provide the experience your customers want, you can focus on long-term business relationships rather than competing mainly on price.

Process Enhancement

Do you need to revise the processes you have in place? With the right software partner this will be a collaborative approach.

According to Bain, a leading Supply Chain consulting firm, targeting significant gains through process re-engineering includes:

1. Focusing on customer needs
2. Standardising complex activities and automating repetitive work
3. Eliminating unproductive activities
4. Allocating team responsibilities for process stages
5. Determining effective approaches to working with third parties to gain maximum value from your business partnerships

None of this is unexpected or unusual. You can then consider the costs associated with each of your business processes to identify which actions to prioritise in your pathway to greater efficiency.

A core part of increasing efficiency is eliminating admin re-work, resulting from conflicting processes that require multiple hand-offs. These multiple hand-offs increase the risk of errors, as well as communication breakdowns that can occur during busy day-to-day tasks.

Some good questions to ask yourself:

• Are any of your current processes limiting your team’s productivity?
• Could your business processes be improved to reduce the pressure on yourself and your team both in productivity and removal of preventable errors?
• What customer experience processes do you have in place to support your team in delivering quality customer outcomes?

 

3PL Specific Processes

Taking a closer look at the 3PL specific processes you can improve or transform with the right solution:

Operations:

• Data entryless customer orders using an order portal, PDF translation of customer orders emails, and EDI capability. This removes the first predictable error – keying in incorrect products or quantities for customer orders.
• Provide full visibility of customer orders from receiving, picking, through to delivery
• Utilise customer returns functionality
• Implement technologies such as RF barcode scanning to improve speed and accuracy
• Warehouse location, wave picking, and freight label printing capability. Applying freight labels at time of picking (whether discreet or wave) removes the second predictable error. Identifying correct product immediately when picked and label it to the correct customer customer order.
• Replenishments
• Item picks/packs and content label tracking as well as picking whole cartons
• Automated billing functionality to replace manual or partially manual processes

Customer Experience:

• Provide customers web portal access for real-time stock availability, order progress, and in transit delivery progress
• Separation of stock quantities by status (saleable, quarantine, under bond, unsaleable)
• Track Proof of Delivery on customer orders
• Enable customers to track their inventory where required by production date, best before, batch, vintage and serialised stock
• Retrieve past details of customer receipts and customer orders
• Customer order deadlines for accepting customer orders

 

Process Re-engineering

Many 3PL systems are hamstrung by unchangeable functionality. What if in the future you have the opportunity for a new contract but your system is not capable of meeting the contract requirements?

There are two potential outcomes here – you are blocked out of competing for some future contracts, or you find a way to develop a workaround that ends up causing errors.

At their worst, such workarounds can quickly turn into inefficient process bottleneck headaches. What you need is a software partner who can work with you to develop custom automations within your software to sidestep the pain of such bottlenecks plus apply automation to address any new requirements as they arise.

If you are looking to ensure you can make the most from your investment now and into the future, then you need a provider that can deliver customised process automation that can support the new business opportunities that will arise.

How will Infoware help re-engineer your processes?

While spreadsheets or other short term fixes may work for a time, they often end up costly and are unsustainable. When you put a bandage on visible symptoms of one or more problems, you may miss their importance as you move forward until it is too late to correct with your customer.

Infoware Services delivers a single source of truth “whole of business” solution across ecommerce, operations & accounting. Infoware provides a very stong baseline in WMS picking productivity, accuracy and visibility. Customisations can be performed when required protecting your investment now, and in the future.

References:

1. https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/us/Documents/process-and-operations/us-cons-process-intelligence-for-supply-chains-and-manufacturing-operations.pdf
   
2. https://www.bain.com/insights/management-tools-business-process-reengineering/
   
3. https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/ca/Documents/about-deloitte/ca-en-covid-19-smb-recovery-toolkit-aoda.pdf
   
4. https://www.bcg.com/capabilities/cost-management/leadership-development/expert-insights/gideon-walter