Tag Archives: 3PL

Committed Americans and Trusting Germans

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Revised on: 2015-09-12

Obviously, selecting the right third-party logistics provider (3PL) for your supply chain is an important decision in supply chain risk management. Here, trust and commitment are two highly interrelated notions that stimulate and facilitate customer loyalty and a long-lasting buyer-supplier relationship that can contribute to mitigating logistics risks. However, customer (and supplier) loyalty is formed differently in different countries. That is at the core of Commitment and Trust as Drivers of Loyalty in Logistics Outsourcing Relationships: Cultural Differences Between the United States and Germany, written jointly by Carl Marcus Wallenburg, David L. Cahill, A. Michael Knemeyer, and Thomas J. Goldsby. Is 3PL outsourcing in Germany really that much different from 3PL outsourcing in the US?
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3PL – a risk orchestrator?

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Revised on: 2015-10-06

Historically, third-party logistics providers, or 3PLs, provided traditional logistics services, such as transportation and warehouse management and nothing more than that. However, the increased volume and scope of services demanded from 3PLs have given rise to their changing role, where today they are engaged in strategic coordination of their customers’ supply chain activities. So say Zach Zacharia, Nada Sanders and Nancy Nix in their most recent article on The Emerging Role of the Third-Party Logistics Provider (3PL) as an Orchestrator. Here they show how 3PLs have evolved from providing logistics capabilities to becoming orchestrators of supply chains that create and sustain a competitive advantage. The question is, what is it that defines an orchestrator? And, are 3Pls also becoming risk orchestrators?

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3PL Outsourcing – Challenges and Benefits

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Revised on: 2015-09-22

A couple of weeks ago I blogged about the flexibility of the logistics provider and how the transport provider plays an important role in supply chain operations, ensuring that they run smoothly and are able to move goods quickly from one place to another. However, relying on a third-party provider for logistics, or 3PL in short, is not without caveats. While there are significant benefits, there are also a number of challenges. That is what Al Ansari and Batoul Modarress investigated in a paper titled Challenges of outsourcing logistics to third-party providers. Here they identify four major challenges a company faces when choosing the right 3PL: current requirements, future growth, information exchange and security.

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