3PL

How Non-Traditional Service Offerings Are Enhancing Supply Chains

Q: How do non-traditional supply chains differ from traditional supply chains? A: Traditionally, 3PL providers offered a specialized set of services focused around warehousing, order fulfillment, transportation and supply chain logistics. Today, several factors have driven 3PLs to non-traditional services that spread their influence further into the supply chain. Non-traditional supply chain services include various […]

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Channeling the Brick and Click Dilemma

As e-commerce continues to transform consumer behavior, retailers explore hybrid omni-channel supply chain models that deliver the best that online and in-store have to offer.

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8 Ways to File Effective Freight Claims

No matter how much you try to prevent cargo loss and damage, well…stuff happens. Follow these eight steps to help recoup your losses.

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Retail Collaboration: It’s All in the Jeans

Work with a team of service providers to get a new retail distribution center up and running in only six months? We should all be so lucky.

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You Say You Want a Co-Evolution?

In human evolution, scientists theorize that primitive man existed 3.8 million years ago. Progress was slow until 200,000 years ago, when modern man made his appearance. Then came a spark of progress: animal domestication, farming, global expansion, refined toolmaking, and more. What we today call the third-party logistics (3PL) sector followed that same evolutionary process. […]

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Turning Back the Pages: 20 Years of Top 100 3PLs

Where were you in 1996? Working your way up the transportation ladder? Starting a career in the logistics field? On the outside looking in? Still in high school? Grade school? Every once in a while it’s fun to throw it back—to an earlier time and reflect on where we come from, where we’ve been, cause […]

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Trends—July 2015

ShippingPass vs. Prime: The Fight for Last-Mile Rights Walmart and Amazon are a study in contrasts, from corporate culture to omni-channel strategy. One promises everyday low prices; the other prioritizes selection and speed. But all things being different, they are chasing the same thing—customer satisfaction. Both retail leaders have found a common battleground when it […]

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Working With the Right Enterprise Logistics Provider Makes Good Companies Significantly Better

In any economy, the key for manufacturers, distributors or retailers is competitive advantage. When companies lack competitive advantage—or worse yet, experience competitive disadvantage—a difficult economic environment amplifies the pain. Principal reasons many good companies have struggled with this issue are limited exposure to best practices, technology, tools, training and internal resource capacity. Companies are increasingly […]

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What “Digital Business” Means for your Business

Q: You recently attended your 11th Gartner Supply Chain Executive Summit. This year the key theme was Digital Business, a core ingredient for supply chain transformation success. What is Digital Business? A: Digital Business is a concept that encompasses the people, processes, and enabling technologies of the supply chain of the future. It all starts […]

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3PLs Can Deliver Big Benefits to Small Companies

No group has benefitted more from the explosion of e-commerce than small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). Still, the perception is often that SMBs deal only in personal, face-to-face interactions between customers and business owners in a brick-and-mortar store. While that personal touch is still very much alive, e-commerce has fundamentally changed and expanded the number […]

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The Evolution of Third-Party Logistics

How past challenges create tomorrow’s solutions.

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Readers’ Choice Top 10 3PL Excellence Awards 2015

3PLs have the tools, people, knowledge, and experience to help supply chains run more efficiently. Which 3PLs did our readers vote the best of the best?

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Prepare for Impact

The best time to brace yourself for a supply chain disruption is before disaster strikes.

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Special Deliveries: Moving the Gargantuan, the Precious, and the Peculiar

When it comes to transporting the oversized, the awkward, the exotic, and the endangered, the secret to success is planning, planning, and more planning.

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Retail Collaboration: It’s All in the Jeans

When Lucky Brand Jeans was sold to a private equity firm, and had to separate from the supply chain of former parent company Fifth & Pacific Companies, the apparel business needed to quickly establish its own, standalone distribution center (DC). The company marshalled help from a third-party logistics (3PL) provider, a technology firm, and a […]

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Three Tips for Doing Business in Canada

Canada offers a unique opportunity for American businesses looking to sell products into new and profitable markets. Canada shares a border with the U.S. that spans 5,525 miles, and entered the North American Free Trade Agreement with the U.S. and Mexico on January 1, 1994. Since then, Canada has purchased a significant number of American […]

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G75: Inbound Logistics’ 75 Green Supply Chain Partners

If you want your carbon footprint to be as small as possible, and your business to be sustainable, then make sure you are doing business with supply chain partners who feel the same way. Inbound Logistics’ annual 75 Green Supply Chain Partners (G75) focuses on showcasing companies that demonstrate green best practices in their supply chain, […]

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Engineering Green DNA

Sustainability and green are two words often used interchangeably. In truth, one is a subset of the other. Sustainability is inclusive, an ethical umbrella that covers a gamut of social, economic, environmental, and business issues. But the idea of sustainment is integral to any green effort. Shippers often run into problems pushing environmental programs because […]

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