By BEUMER Group
Cooperation between shippers and 3PLs – such as those working with fashion fulfilment centres – can help create innovative solutions that will benefit everyone in the future. To make it work, shippers must express their needs and challenges while 3PLs must listen and find paths to address and adapt — and both must recognise the value of these investments and partnerships.
Here are five ways that both can more successfully partner and innovate.
1. Clearly communicate needs and possible solutions
Regular reviews between 3PLs and their customers are perfect opportunities to discuss performance and issues. These reviews can provide perspective on current performance and stimulate broader discussion on the shipper’s supply chain ambitions and concerns, providing opportunities for 3PLs to consider how their services can evolve to meet their customers’ needs. For example, shippers and 3PLs are beginning to develop more long term relationships which enable the 3PLs to make longer term investments.
This complex moment in time also presents a major opportunity for shippers to reinvent their supply chains. Key to this transformation will be the way they work with 3PLs— and for 3PLs to understand the evolving needs of shippers.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP), warehouse management (WMS), transportation management (TMS), global trade management (GTM), procurement and the other applications that are part of open source software supply the type of data that will support clear communication when shippers and 3PLs are reviewing performance and issues.
What is Open Platform Software?
Open platform software is an open-ended software architecture that is able to communicate with other interfaces. It uses the Internet Protocol, meaning it is built using a language every software system understands and every web browser communicates with. The more open the software foundation, the easier it is to integrate and attach different systems to a Warehouse Control System (WCS).