Heeding the Call of Shippers: What 3PLs must know to survive the e-commerce revolution

Strides being made

Shippers may continue to complain about the lack of response from the forwarding community about their complaints, but there has been some progress in recent years. “The industry has been successful, most notably by improving optimization engines,” said Cunnane. “Companies like BluJay Solutions, Transplace, and C.H. Robinson sell their own transportation management systems [TMS], but also use their solution for managed transportation services. Customers can start with managed services and then move the solution in house.”

The key element of success of TMS, Hudson said, is integration – from inventory management to order management, all the way through to fulfillment. “Platforms that can do this in a seamless fashion will be in the best competitive position in the future,” he said.

C.H. Robinson was one of the early adopters of creating a mobile logistics platform when it launched Navisphere in 2013, and today has more than 220,000 organizations signed into its network. “Supply chains are constantly in motion, so having continuous visibility to each movement is a requirement for logistics professionals,” said Tom Mahlke, the U.S.-based 3PL’s chief information officer. “The Navisphere app gives customers another method to stay connected and informed on all their shipments.”

Along with C.H. Robinson, Sciarrotta also singled out XPO Logistics for its similar commitment to sharing data and providing transparency. This spring, the 3PL introduced XPO Connect, it’s cloud-based, digital freight marketplace that uses machine-learning techniques to give shippers access to various types of business intelligence, including data on fluctuations in capacity, spot rates and load postings by geography, said Mario Harik, CIO for XPO.

“When it comes to parcels, FedEx, UPS and DHL are going to rule,” Sciarrotta said. “But for anything that’s [less than truckload] LTL or too big for the integrators, 3PLs like XPO and C.H. Robinson understand they have to have the same level of information shared with the shipper.”

Another prominent forwarder, Kuwait-based Agility Logistics, earlier this year launched Shipa Freight, a fully integrated online freight service that allows users to get rate quotes and book, pay and track shipments around the world. Shipa Freight is designed to simplify the complexity of international shipping for SMEs, giving them the transparency, flexibility and customer service capabilities that are usually reserved for multinationals and high-volume customers.

Agility CEO Tarek Sultan said Shipa Freight provides shippers with “a compliance database with information on documents required on all trade lanes, helping them navigate the legal and regulatory requirements that are obstacles for many small businesses.”