How much do you really know about how your 3PL provider works? How much do you really care? After all, you outsourced your fulfillment to a third party organization precisely because you wanted to remove all of that complication from your plate and focus on other things. 

In Part 1 of this blog series, we started to show you how, if your third-party fulfillment provider is a “black box” to you, meaning that you just put your products and materials into one end and they get shipped to your customers at the other end without you having much visibility into what happens in between, you could be paying much more for those services than you should be. Having visibility into your fulfillment process doesn’t mean that you spend all your time paying attention to it, but it does mean that any time you have a question about how it works, you can get answers and ensure that things are running as efficiently as possible.

Savings Through Partnership

It also means that you and your 3PL provider can work together as partners, not just as a transactional relationship. At Spectra, when we establish a fulfillment contract with a client, we intend for it to be a relationship that actively benefits that client. It starts with receiving, stocking, and shipping the products that the client entrusts to us, but that’s just the basics. Things start to get more interesting once the Spectra team has become familiar with the client’s list of offerings, the way their customers interact with them, and how our expert fulfillment practices might be able to improve the process.

Franchise fulfillment clients, for example, often need more than just basic fulfillment services, like shipping a kit of materials to a franchisee when they place an order. Some promotional materials are applicable to special events, like a location’s grand opening, and the franchisor may also want to offer marketing materials for holidays and seasonal products. These materials can be returned after the promotional period is over, then restocked to be used again next year, or by the next franchisee that launches a special marketing effort.

These restocking services, including rework, refurbishing, and other tasks that are needed to restore used materials to good condition for the next customer, are all within the abilities of the Spectra team. By coordinating these services with the client, we can help the client save money by creating fewer brand new materials, reusing collateral whenever possible, and streamlining the reverse logistics process so that everything is restocked and ready to ship again as soon as possible.

Online Portals

We’ve saved the best feature of visibility into your 3PL provider’s process until last! It’s a tool that has only been available to fulfillment clients in recent years, but it has revolutionized the way organizations and their 3PL partners work together. We’re talking about the online portal, a tool that Spectra offers to all of its fulfillment clients. This dashboard maximizes visibility for the client, allowing them to see all sorts of metrics, not only related to past activity, but updated in real time.

In the worlds of e-commerce and B2B fulfillment, data is of primary importance. The more an organization knows about their customers’ interaction with their products, the better they can focus on best-selling offerings, stop investing in unpopular items, and make adjustments to products that have potential but aren’t selling well for whatever reason. In the past, though, these decisions have necessarily been based on data collected on orders from the past months or years. 

Today, a client can use the Spectra online portal to do what was impossible in past decades: get a look in real time into how all of their products are moving. A meeting with decision makers regarding the discontinuation or modification of a certain product can be informed with data collected that morning, allowing product managers to know exactly what’s happening with that product. If executives at the organization want to know exactly how many of a certain SKU are in stock and ready to ship out ahead of a special promotion, they can get that information in real time and place additional orders if needed.

This dramatically increased level of data and metrics means that the client has a huge amount of agility in decision making. And as the organization’s expert fulfillment partner, Spectra is ready to help them make quick changes to the way they stock their inventory, conduct pick and pack/kitting processes, and ship orders to B2B customers.

Get the Visibility You Deserve

Today’s advanced inventory management tools make it possible to streamline the fulfillment process more powerfully than ever before. To take advantage of that potential, however, your organization needs to be partnered with a 3PL provider that makes the most of those tools and passes the advantages on to you. 

Over time, the online portal that you use to monitor the fulfillment of your products becomes even more powerful, enabling Spectra to get more accurate at predicting future customer orders and volumes. With an experienced, knowledgeable partner like Spectra in charge of your fulfillment activities, your company becomes an expert at fulfillment, saving money every month and giving B2B or B2C customers better service than they expect on every order.

The Spectra team loves the experience of revealing to a new client just how transparent, powerful, and beneficial a fulfillment process can be when it’s not a black box. We do the opposite of trying to hide what we do between receiving and shipping! Through our online portal and frequent, meaningful communication with the client, we do our best to become the fully integrated fulfillment department that the client always wishes they had.

We are excited about sharing case studies, reviews, and examples of our work with clients in all sectors, of all sizes, and with all sorts of different products to show how we’ve helped them rise above the competition in their field. Contact us today to learn more!