After months of uncertainty for businesses in essentially every industry across the world, this year has taught us the importance of being agile and able to adapt to new ways of working. So, with 2020 coming to a close, we want to explore some of the challenges we have noticed organisations in the logistics industry are facing as a result of this year that has been like no other.

Lack of reporting & analytics

When you have got multiple orders of multiple products from multiple vendors going out to multiple end-customers, it can get very confusing when tracking and understanding your business performance. As the whole world essentially runs on data nowadays, a lack of reporting & analytics tools for your 3PL business can be a big disadvantage – not just for you as you’re unable to understand your business performance, but also for your customers. Customers want to understand important metrics such as delivery times, but this is impossible if you do not have an analytics/reporting system in place. For you as a business you also want to be observing any bottlenecks or inconsistencies in performance, so you can make data-backed decisions to improve your overall business performance.

Maybe looking into a powerful reporting system that accurately links your WMS & other back end systems is a good idea?

Meeting rising customer expectations

Retaining your customers and keeping all their requirements met is essential for 3PL, but with custom expectations continually rising it can be difficult for businesses to keep up and provide the service that is expected. Costs and delivery times are trying to be driven down by your customers as well as a necessity for reliability in your operation. With collaborating being necessary between customers, vendors, shippers and others you want there to be visibility throughout it all. Customers expect visibility into your processes and an easy way to understand what is going on and contact you.

Using old technology and legacy systems can be a hindrance to your customer service as you may not be able to provide the information that customers need, so it’s important to be using appropriate technology that can ensure your customer service is first-rate.

Productivity problems across logistics processes

Time is money and having a workforce that cannot be productive means money is being wasted. With the COVID-19 pandemic causing changes to our lives in almost every way and changing the way we work, processes should be streamlined to ensure you can keep up with any changes and have your workforce working at 100%. Using legacy systems with long, multi-step processes that can easily be automated will be hindering your employee’s productivity.

To remain successful during these challenging times, your workforce needs suitable, intelligent technology that works efficiently and allows them to be productive, maintain visibility & enable collaboration in the busy, demanding industry of Third-Party logistics.

We hope this blog post has shared insight into some of the challenges we have noticed businesses in the third-party logistics industry have been facing this year. If you feel you can relate to these challenges, then it is probably time to invest in new technology to ensure you can deal with the changes forced upon you over this last year. It may seem like a risky time to invest, but we see an investment into technology as one that reduces risk, helping your organisation optimise your daily processes for the upcoming years ahead.