Strategies to Optimize your 3PL Fulfillment Workflows

Posted by:

Kristina Mustenikov

Is your 3PL warehouse struggling to keep up with demand, bogged down by manual processes, or unable to plan ahead for seasonal surges?

Hear from this real-world case study on how this 3PL overcame manual workflows and harnessed the power of integrations to unlock e-commerce opportunities for growth.

Join CartonCloud, Starshipit, and Brisbane Logistics in exploring real-world scenarios and practical strategies to optimize your 3PL warehouse. See how growing 3PLs leverage automation to streamline workflows, prioritize customers, and maintain operational flexibility.

TLDR? We’ve rounded up the top 5 strategies to optimize your 3PL fulfillment workflows:

Automating your administrative tasks
Identify and prioritize on key focus areas
Accommodate your customer’s unique requirements
Increase customer visibility into operations
Prepare for high-volume peak seasons

1. Automating administrative tasks

Optimizing your 3PL warehouse starts with automating your manual processes.

Vincent Fletcher, Chief Product Officer and Co Founder of CartonCloud explains how automation is key in helping reduce administrative costs, while generating more output.

"We have countless examples of businesses around Australia, New Zealand, and North America where what was holding them back was administrative overheads.”

“[They were unable] to put more volume through their organization without having to linearly increase the number of staff to process [the volume] at the same time."

Scott Logan, Managing Director of Brisbane Logistics shares how automating his admin helps them process large orders.

“Having the ability for CartonCloud and Starshipit to provide the backend to process the orders from an admin perspective allows us to do automated freights out the other side,” said Mr Logan.

“We can say, 'This is a special job. We have 200-300 orders that have to go out in the space of two days,' but we can process that in the warehouse as long as we have everything in order on the admin side. This means we aren't making mistakes, and we don't have to manually enter data or manually select freight.”

Mr Logan explained by eliminating manual processes, they’ve been able to have one staff member take care of all the admin work.

“[Automating our admin work] allows us to get the goods out as quickly as we can, making the client happy."

2. Know where to focus your efforts

When optimizing your 3PL, you need to focus your efforts on the right solution that will work best for your warehouse and workflows.

"I think a lot of people tend to couple increased productivity with reducing errors, but often those two things are at odds,” said Mr Fletcher.

A common example is seeking the ability to scan each item coming into the warehouse, but by doing so, outdated systems can create a week-long backlog in their workflow to get each item on the shelf.

“You need to know which problem you're solving,” he said.

“If it's efficiency, you can often pick items a lot faster if you don't scan them. Implementing scanning can reduce error rates, but it also takes longer."

Mr Logain explained how only some of his clients use barcodes, so at Brisbane Logistics, they adapt their workflow to better suit the client’s requirements.

"By using CartonCloud, it has allowed us to use different methods depending on the client. For some clients, we use scanning; for others, we use pick sheets, and for some, we use double-checking.”

Learn more about how you can use barcode scanning in your warehouse here.

3. Accommodate unique customer requirements

Having the ability to scale and offer flexible solutions and services to your customers can open the door to new revenue opportunities.

With more and more customers shifting to an e-commerce model, it's important to be able to support their unique requirements.

"We're seeing businesses which were exclusively non-e-comm, like 3PLs focused solely on food or craft liquor distribution, are increasingly having to do aspects of e-comm work. It's becoming more of an expectation," explained Mr Fletcher.

“There has been a change to less of the traditional B2B model. [Clients are] still doing that, but now they are also doing more with, for example, a Shopify store, and asking if we can support that. This shift means fewer emails asking, 'Can you do this, please?' and moving towards a more automated Shopify integration," said Mr Logan.

Learn more about integrating Shopify with CartonCloud here.

4. Provide your customers with more visibility

Optimizing your 3PL operations goes hand-in-hand with optimizing your customer’s experience.

By giving your customers increased visibility into your operations, you can reduce the time spent on answering customer queries and spend more time focusing on running your operations.

"The reports [in CartonCloud] have provided the ability for our clients to log in and see all of their stock levels, orders, purchase orders, and the tracking that flows back from Starshipit.”

“They can do all of that in one place without needing to ask us any questions. We have certainly found that this has increased customer satisfaction," said Mr Logan.

5. Be prepared for peak seasons

Prepare for seasonal shifts with data-led decisions and easily scalable workflows.

For most 3PLs, peak seasons will vary between clients, which is why having the ability to scale easily allows 3PLs to keep up with demand when it comes.

“The ability to scale up and down with both CartonCloud and Starshipit is critical [in allowing us to adjust things as we go through the year] and having integrations ready to go when that time comes,” said Mr Logan.

“CartonCloud and Starshipit allow you to quickly process orders, as long as the integrations are there. Using the integration team at CartonCloud has always been very helpful in getting those things done as quickly as possible.”

Clear communication with clients is key to success. By knowing projected volumes as well as planned promotions in advance, Brisbane Logistics can then anticipate how much staff they need to pick and pack orders.

Mr Fletcher adds that it’s important that your software is easy to learn and use, especially for peak periods when you take on temporary staff.

"To bring on temporary staff, we focus a lot on making the software as easy to use and intuitive as possible. We try to ensure that what the person is doing on the floor is straightforward and simple.”

“This is super critical, especially at that time of year when you might need to pull your office workers down into the warehouse temporarily to help get through orders. They might never have used a scan gun before, but they need to learn in the next 15 minutes because you're drowning in work."