Plan, procure, execute, & track transportation for every shipment across your supply chain & logistics operations
A SaaS solution to help grow your business by achieving 100% perfect order execution at high volumes
Increase vehicle capacity utilization and customer promise adherence
Grow your business with omnichannel presence and automated pickups
Consolidate shipments for hub to hub movement across land and air
Real-time customer communications and collect accurate PODs
Orchestrate logistics operations with multiple 3rd party carriers
Achieve cost effective, scalable, sustainable, and customer centric deliveries
Orchestrate all your cross-border logistics operations with ease
Improve address accuracy, ensure first-attempt delivery success, reduce costs and boost customer experience
Gain end-to-end shipment visibility, get proactive alerts, and send customers live tracking links
Grow business in a dynamic world and manage operations across First, Middle & Last mile
Delight customers by seamlessly managing store and online orders across own fleet and 3rd party
Reduce freight costs & get end to end visibility across shipments
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Before we delve into how logistics automation benefits third party logistics companies manage deliveries, let’s check out some interesting statistics about 3PL market and 3PL logistics providers:
3PL logistics providers handle the supply chain and logistics operations of a company to facilitate timely and cost-efficient movement of goods from one place to another. They have infrastructure, resources, and technology to manage procurement, transportation, order picking and packing, order fulfillment, reverse logistics, and various other operations.
However, evolving customer expectations, technological disruptions and the gradual, but definite, shift towards automation and digitization is nudging the 3PL logistics providers towards smart automation. The need for newer, more reliable and technology-powered operational management is getting amplified and the intense market competition is calling for rethinking of old operational models.
Here, we discuss the current challenges in relation to logistics and operational excellence that are faced by 3PL logistics providers and share how smart automation can help businesses overcome these challenges. We also share the key considerations businesses should keep in mind while choosing automation solutions and how customized end-to-end operations management solutions can make a difference. Let’s check out some of these common logistics challenges 3PL companies face.
A 3PL handles the logistics and supply chain operations of multiple companies from various industries, such as e-commerce, manufacturing, and retail. Manually performing operations such as order allocation, order dispatch, route planning, multiple shipment tracking, and more can lead to poor delivery productivity and increased time and overall logistics costs.
Most businesses receive high order volumes during sales or festive seasons. Due to dependency on manual processes and limited resources, 3PL logistics providers find it challenging to manage high order volumes and make deliveries. This directly impacts a 3PL’s reputation and can also lead to the loss of business.
Increased number of returns, fuel consumption, demurrage and detention, repeated delivery attempts, and other logistics issues add up to the total logistics costs. Minimizing these costs is one of the biggest challenges in front of third-party logistics providers.
Manual planning and optimizing delivery routes is a time-intensive task. However, it is not possible for a human to consider multiple factors such as historical data of routes, weather and traffic conditions, delivery location, delivery time window, and more and design optimal delivery routes to ensure on-time deliveries and reduced fuel consumption.
While delivering goods from one location to another, drivers can make unnecessary diversions or stops, which can impact the time of delivery and, ultimately, customer experience. In the absence of real-time shipment tracking, stakeholders cannot check the whereabouts and accurate ETA (estimated time of arrival) of their shipment.
The inability to communicate with end customers can result in increased delivery attempts and poor customer experience. Similarly, not being able to collaborate with the businesses (3PL company’s clients) and internal teams can lead to operational inefficiencies.
Governments worldwide are making stringent policies and regulations to control carbon emissions. But, inefficient logistics management can increase fuel consumption, trip volumes, and miles traveled, which contributes to increasing CO2 emissions.
When a customer raises a return request, the entire product journey is created from scratch to pick up the product from the customer’s location and bring it back to the hub. Managing the process inefficiently not only increases the time for the entire process but also contributes to the already-high logistics costs.
Factors like the inability to offer real-time tracking, delayed deliveries, and poor communication impacts the overall delivery experience. According to reports, more than 85% of customers won’t buy from a retailer after only one poor customer experience.
The smart logistics management solution for 3PL providers automates first-mile pickups , mid-mile trip creation, last mile routing, task allocation, hub pickups, and almost all other processes involved in the first, middle, and last mile logistics. It reduces dependence on human resources, saves time, and ensures accuracy in the tasks performed.
To manage deliveries during peak order volumes, advanced 3PL logistics management systems offer intelligent order clubbing. The system accommodates new delivery or returns pick-up requests with already planned deliveries to save time, costs, and resources.
Logistics automation helps 3PL logistics providers to scale without actually investing in more resources. With features like vehicle capacity utilization, smart 3PL logistics solutions make the optimal use of existing resources and improve delivery productivity.
Smart 3PL logistics management platforms leverage AI and ML to plan and optimize delivery routes considering various constraints such as delivery location, delivery time, real-time traffic and weather conditions, and more. The motive of delivery route optimization is to ensure more number of deliveries using the least resources in the minimum time and costs possible.
AI-powered 3PL management solutions enable stakeholders to get granular level visibility on each shipment. It automatically triggers updates via SMS/WhatsApp/Email to all stakeholders to keep them updated with the current status of the shipment and accurate ETAs.
Logistics automation enables 3PL logistics providers to collaborate with its customers as well as internal teams from a single dashboard. To establish hassle-free communication between the end-customer and the delivery drivers, the smart 3PL logistics management solution automatically shares the delivery driver’s contact details, masked to maintain privacy, once the order is out for delivery. They can connect to the driver as and when needed.
By implementing logistics automation, 3PL logistics providers can have predictive and real-time data analytics. They can check the number of failed deliveries, the number of trips created, tasks assigned per trip, the number of ongoing trips, and more to plan logistics strategies efficiently. It drives accurate decision-making that leads to customer satisfaction and business profitability.
After the delivery, the software automatically triggers a feedback collection message to know customers’ delivery experience. They can share their feedback and also raise a concern in case of any delivery-related issues.
Logistics automation facilitates effortless NDR management to identify primary reasons for undelivered consignments and know NDRs that are most frequently cited in a particular geography, most recorded at an origin hub, and more.
Dynamic delivery alerts keep stakeholders informed about the current status of the consignment. Moreover, they can also check accurate ETA. These alerts help increase first attempt delivery success rate.
An advanced 3PL logistics management solution automates the returns management process; it automatically assigns the return pick-up requests to the driver who is making deliveries within the vicinity of the pickup location. This speeds up the returns process and improves customers’ experience.
Logistics sustainability can be achieved by reducing fuel consumption, and decreasing empty miles and distance traveled. Logistics automation ensures all this with intelligent route optimization, vehicle capacity utilization, and territory optimization. It empowers 3PL service providers to ensure greener logistics.
By embracing Shipsy’s smart logistics management solution, 3PL logistics providers can digitize first, middle, and last mile logistics operations to meet diverse delivery requirements, achieve greater SLA adherence, improve business profitability, and delight end-customers as well as their clients.
Moreover, 3PL providers can have greater operational visibility and transparency and ensure optimum resource utilization. They can find optimized delivery routes and utilize geofencing to make sure that drivers follow the exact delivery route and deliver orders on time. Moreover, 3PL providers can also collect digitized PoD to avoid frauds and fake deliveries.
The customized SaaS-based 3PL logistics solution helps 3PL providers unlock benefits like:
If you are interested to know more about our 3PL logistics solution, reach out to one of our experts for a custom demo.
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