Finding the right 3PL provider can be challenging, frustrating and time consuming.
Our highly refined process can help.
How It Works
Given the opaque nature of the 3PL market and the intimidating number of options, it's easy to make the wrong choice. Our process is designed to combine an understanding of your brand and the inner workings of 3PLs to help you find the right partner to meet your business goals.
1. Preparation
There’s more to finding the right long-term 3PL than economics and performance. Our first step is to get to know your brand and dive into the data to identify your unique needs, challenges and what you’re looking for in a partner.
To kick things off we will —
Meet with stakeholders to understand the scope and scale of your business, as well as what’s important to you from a culture and brand perspective.
Compile key information and data about your current operations, product assortment and marketing strategies, as well as future growth plans.
Determine your criteria for a successful 3PL partnership, using proprietary tools that make sense of the rapidly changing fulfillment market to guide the process.
2. Curation
Using original research, our combined 20+ years of experience and your input, we’ll mine through our vast database of vetted third party logistics providers to find the right partner to meet your shipping and fulfillment needs.
To get to our short list of potential 3PLs we will —
Leverage the information collected in the Search Preparation step to identify which 3PLs in our vetted network are a potential match.
Provide you an overview of each 3PL, summarizing their capabilities and why they’d be a fit for you. We’ll discuss each provider in depth to ensure you understand all your options, and you’ll have plenty of opportunities to ask us questions along the way.
Prepare an overview of your business to eliminate the need to fill out each 3PL’s data request form. This overview will contain all the information 3PLs need to determine if they will participate in the search and prepare a pricing proposal.
3. Outreach
We’ll meet with the most promising 3PLs, and manage the screening process end to end, taking tedious tasks off your plate and expediting the search process. At the end of this stage, we’ll secure proposals from the most viable 3PL options.
To determine if the 3PL is able to support your business we will —
Reach out to each selected 3PL on your behalf, providing an overview of your brand and requesting a pricing proposal from them.
Manage all communications with the 3PL provider on your behalf. There’s typically a fair amount of back-and-forth, follow-up questions and meetings requested by 3PLs that we will handle on your behalf.
Provide you with updates throughout the process and work with you to answer any additional questions that the provider has beyond what has been shared.
4. Evaluation
Understanding different providers' pricing proposals is an unnecessarily complicated process. Because no two 3PLs assess fees the same way, we created a proprietary evaluation tool to translate various proposals into uniform units of measurement — simplifying and adding clarity to the evaluation process to guide you through comparing your proposals, and choosing the right provider for your business.
To help select your new 3PL we will —
Prepare and maintain an evaluation tool that outlines the economics of each proposal, the pros and cons of each provider and the facility they are proposing for you.
Establish a baseline for the financial implications of selecting a new 3PL provider by calculating the cost of your current 3PL provider and showing how it compares to your options.
Meet with you and your team to review, discuss and answer any questions on the 3PL Evaluation and pricing proposals received.
5. Decision
It’s now time to make a decision on who your future 3PL provider will be and sign a commercial agreement with them.
We will help you by doing the following:
Support you with conducting any additional due diligence needed to make the final decision including warehouse site visits, 3PL personnel interviews, technology demos and follow up calls with the “short list” of 3PL providers being considered.
Support you in making a decision on which 3PL provider to select. While we believe this decision is one you must make, we will coach and advise on what to consider and help you interpret the additional information you have gathered.
Support Fulfillment Contract negotiations including how to negotiate with the provider(s), where opportunity for concessions may exist, general best practices for reviewing a fulfillment contract and industry standards on commercial terms.