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.

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.

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.

During a recent meeting with KANE associates, our long-time business partner, Sam’s Club, reminded the team that they were “the backbone of this economy right now.”

It was a heartfelt comment that cut right to the heart of the matter – without logistics workers, the supply lines for essential goods like food and household staples stop flowing and commerce grinds to a halt.

As the percent of online sales grow and as the line between web and traditional retail store fulfillment blurs, E-retailers and brands need to assess their fulfillment capabilities and those of their 3PL omnichannel distribution partners.

Following are 8 tips to maximize efficiency in an omnichannel environment. 

KANE’s new Chief Operating Officer is Patrick Coughlin, a 30+ year logistics industry veteran with a strong history of driving performance excellence in corporate logistics and 3PL environments. We recently sat down with Patrick to discuss the trends and opportunities he’s seeing in the market.

Each month we write several articles on some aspect of logistics management. It’s always interesting to look back at the end of the year and see which ones had the highest readership. This year, a cost-saving blog topped the list (no surprise), but it was followed by two blogs focused on talent recruitment, illustrating what a key challenge this is for logistics organizations.