3PLs provide a valuable service to retailers. They act as an extension of the retailer’s operations by accepting and tracking inventory from suppliers, processing and fulfilling orders, and shipping completed orders to the retailer’s customers. They specialize in back-office warehouse operations so their customers can focus on developing new products and growing their brands.
However, on top of the typical operational challenges faced by any warehouse operator, 3PLs must contend with additional challenges due the unique nature of their business:
- 3PLs need to be highly flexible to win new customers. Different customers may have different inventory storage requirements or shipping SLAs. They need to be able to stand up and support operations quickly for growing e-commerce brands or large and established omni-channel retailers.
- Must also be able to adapt quickly when existing customers grow. 3PLs must also figure out how to profitably work with nascent e-commerce brands that are growing quickly one month, but out of business six months later.
- The evolving nature of many of these business relationships makes investing in automation equipment difficult as the typical payback period for automation is many years, and reusing or repurposing equipment for different customers is hard. As a result, many 3PLs depend on manual fulfillment operations to help with flexibility and reuse.
Fulfillment Engines is the most flexible warehouse execution system (WES) for 3PLs.
- Fulfillment Engines is order profile agnostic and adapts operations to order profile changes on the fly to help 3PLs meet a wide variety of customer requirements cost effectively.
- The system is designed to support both dedicated and multi-tenant facilities. 3PLs can configure different pick zones, SLAs, and labor management settings for each brand.
- To help 3PLs win new business and retain customers for renewals, Fulfillment Engines optimizes manual fulfillment to reduce labor costs by 20% to 40% for typical warehouse operations. Fulfillment Engines can be deployed in phases for a single brand or pick zone, without disrupting the rest of the current operations.
- Fulfillment Engines scales operations up and down seamlessly as brand order volumes change over time.
Contact us to learn more about how Fulfillment Engines can help your 3PL improve operational flexibility and reduce labor costs.