46 DC VELOCITY JUNE 2014 www.dcvelocity.com
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to drown in data. You want to focus a relationship on a core set of metrics aligned
with the desired outcomes.
“The third thing is the reality that at the
end of the day, it is people that get things
done,” he adds. “You cannot underestimate the influence of people-to-people
relationships.”
OUT OF MANY, ONE VIEW
Of those three considerations, historically,
it’s been that first aspect—the technology—that has proved to be the biggest
hurdle, creating problems on both sides.
For 3PLs, working with multiple customers
once meant employing multiple warehouse
management systems (WMS) and transportation management systems (TMS).
“We’ve seen a migration away from that,”
Gonzalez says. Many 3PLs have developed
standard platforms to serve all their customers, making the technology more scalable and manageable.
For businesses making use of multiple
3PLs, the issue can be fragmentation of
data. That very real problem leads some
companies to assign a lead logistics provid-
er to consolidate and orchestrate informa-
tion flowing to and from all third parties.
But not every company has the resources to
do that. “More commonly, the onus is on
the shipper to have a technology platform
that is able to take information from across
trading partners and aggregate the data,”
Gonzalez says. “The challenge becomes
aggregating the data from different sources
and making sure it is accurate, timely, and
complete. The objective is to have a single
view of the supply chain.”
The technology to enable that has
improved steadily. Stubbs says visibility
between the 3PLs and the owners of the
inventory can come via linking inventory
in the 3PL’s possession directly into the
customer’s WMS, or if the 3PL has a robust
enough WMS itself, giving each customer
access to its own data through secure nodes
in that system. He says several WMS pro-
viders specialize in the 3PL market just to
provide that kind of visibility.
Best-practice 3PLs, he says, work off
advance ship notices (ASNs), which pro-
vide information from the client’s suppliers
on what’s actually coming—which may not
match what was ordered. “As soon as the
hands of a third party can still be
a challenge. “Visibility and control
is an area that both parties contin-
ue to struggle with,” says Adrian
Gonzalez, president of Adelante
SCM, a research firm that specializ-
es in third-party logistics.
The ideal for a shipper who owns
the goods, Gonzalez says, is to have
systems that make it appear as if
he is managing it himself—having
all your goods in a single view.
But that’s easier said than done,
Gonzalez acknowledges. “And the
more 3PLs you have, the more of
a challenge it becomes. You have
multiple relationships to manage,
multiple systems to integrate with.”
These days, it’s pretty common
for shippers to be working with
multiple providers, according to
Gonzalez. For most companies,
using a single 3PL for all out-
sourced operations isn’t realistic, he
explains. “For years, they have tried
to consolidate as much as they can,
but at the end of the day, it’s like
technology—you go with the best
of breed.”
Regardless of how many 3PL part-
ners a shipper might be using, the
fact remains that working with one
of more 3PLs adds a level of com-
plexity to tracking and managing
your goods. So what can shippers
do to make the process as seamless
as possible?
Gonzalez says there are three key
considerations. The first is the technical aspect—the integration of 3PL
systems with the customer’s internal systems.
“Another element is getting alignment around the key metrics that
will be guideposts for making sure
on a day-to-day basis, you are moving in the direction you need to be
moving in,” Gonzalez says. “And
those metrics will change over time.
The main thing is, you don’t want
