In any business, it is natural to feel uneasy when it comes to trusting someone else to handle your products. You work hard to create a quality inventory and expect others to treat your product respectively.
At some point, you may find that the success in your production could make it hard to manage the logistics. This is where the manager or the owner of the business turns to third-party logistics (3PL).
There are four reasons why you should consider using 3PL:
- You don’t have the proper equipment. It could be that you don’t have a large enough vehicle, or a forklift to transload the product. Either way, if you’re not considering buying heavy machinery, you might want to consider working with a third-party logistics company.
- You don’t have the space. Managing and moving products takes up space and time. If your business doesn’t have the capacity for a moving truck, you can turn to a third-party logistics company to handle that for you.
- It’s inefficient. You are succeeding in your business for a reason. You put your focus in your product. Trying to add logistics to your daily management could double your work and take the focus out of perfecting your product. While it may seem costly at first, working with a third-party logistics company can pay off financially, and in efficiency.
- Your product requires transloading. This one might be the most important reason. If your product is traveling most of the way by train, you may need someone else to offload your product to deliver it the rest of the way by road. Or vice versa. You might start on a truck, and need someone else to load your product on a train. This is where a third-party logistics company becomes necessary.
The graphic below shows where a 3PL company steps in during the process of working with you and your product.
Here are some things to ask when picking a 3PL company:
- Product knowledge: Do they know how to handle your particular product?
- Good communication: The buyer, the 3PL company, and the seller should have a good understanding of what is going out, when, and how. Make sure your 3PL company has a good reputation when it comes to communicating with their customers.
- Experience: When you are looking for a 3PL company, it helps if they have experience handling their equipment, and products similar to yours. That way you can guarantee the success of your product’s distribution.
Buyers can also hire 3PL companies to ship from you, but that’s a whole different article. Subscribe to our blog to read more from us!
Rapid Deployment Systems, Inc. 