Consumer Goods Logistics Blog

The choice and effectiveness of your 3PL relationships have an enormous impact on your company’s profitability and its reputation with your customers. We find that the factors that lead shippers to seek out 3PLs in the first place – things like freight capacity, experience in an industry, expertise with a particular service – often are not the reasons that companies choose and stay with a 3PL provider. It’s more the intangible benefits, beyond service and cost, that make the biggest impression.

In our last article, we looked at what shippers could do to maximize logistics outsourcing benefits. In this article, we’ll focus on the intangible benefits that you should look for to ensure positive, long-term 3PL relationships. Consider asking yourself the following questions in your 3PL evaluation process.

A good third-party logistics partner (3PL) can add value far beyond the cost of the service. But the extent of that value is significantly influenced by the actions of the outsourcing company and how it manages the relationship.

This article offers 5 things shippers can do to maximize the benefits of logistics outsourcing.

If you manage distribution for a food manufacturer, distributor or retailer, you’re concerned not only with shipping accurate, on-time orders, but also with cold chain management, regulatory compliance, food safety, and other specialized logistics challenges. Those concerns are magnified if you outsource any portion of your operations to outside food logistics companies, since you need to closely monitor these operations.

Any company can claim food logistics expertise, but what should you look for in order to distinguish claims from reality? Here are 7 tips to consider.

What country drinks the most wine and spirits in the world, per capita?

Drumroll, please….

According to Alcohol.com, it’s Belarus, followed by Lithuania, Grenada and the Czech Republic.

What 3PL distributes the most wine and spirits in the U.S.?

We’re not sure, but this year Kane Logistics will ship about 26 million cases of wine & spirits for its customers, building on our 30-year strategic focus on wine and spirits logistics. We recently sat down with two of KANE’s top operators for wine and spirits logistics – Richard Reilly and Mike Kelly – to discuss the top challenges associated with this type of product. Following are 7 priority challenges that they identified.

Specific consumer products all look pretty much the same as they roll off the manufacturing line.

But to satisfy the various ways retailers want to sell products and consumers want to receive them, these products are bundled, wrapped, sealed, tied and packed into dozens of different configurations for final sale.

This is called secondary packaging and it’s very expensive for manufacturers to constantly adapt their production lines to create this multitude of packaging configurations. So, they lean on outside resources to streamline packaging.

Other than inventory, your logistics workforce is the largest expense in your distribution centers, eating up 50–70% of the warehousing budget. It’s why managing and reducing labor-related expenses is a top priority for just about every logistics executive.

At Kane Logistics, we’re proud that our associate retention levels with our top 10 customers is 80.2%, compared to the industry average of 53.9% (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics). Here are 10 logistics workforce management strategies that work for us, and may work for you.

Back in 2005, the Tyler Texas Area Builders Association built a large home from the ground up in less than 3 hours. At the time, it set a record. Here's the video.  

It was a promotional effort to publicize the Association, but the overarching message was the importance of planning. While the build itself took just 2:52 hours, it was the product of months of meetings – among engineers, architects, builders, landscapers, tradesman, and project planners – to spec out every last aspect of the project. 

We’ve seen no negative impact on KANE customers’ freight during COVID-19 – a great accomplishment that has required a spirited effort by our transportation team. Here are some of the issues we’ve had to face.