Broomfield, CO, October 7, 2020 — As much as the ecommerce boom is a commercial opportunity for once traditional B2B companies, they’re facing acute growing pains as they struggle to meet B2C fulfillment demands.
Not all B2Bs are reacting with internal changes to their processes though; many are aligning with third party logistics (3PL) companies instead. However, such a partnership often strains 3PL operations and models, said SnapFulfil CEO Don White.
“It’s mostly due to new-style customer requirements being introduced that are difficult to systemically accommodate and therefore hard to perform efficiently while also maintaining proper inventory visibility and accuracy,” explained White. “We’re talking gift experience, low-mix/high volume, size/weight packaging requirements, high mix/low volume, increased service and delivery levels, etc, but most challenging is having to qualify internal limitations or present an unattractive price in order to cover the transactional cost to the 3PL.
“Consequently, we’ve been working ever closely with 3PLs to provide a scalable, easily configured, API friendly and robust pathway to meet the demands of B2C multichannel fulfillment operations. Advanced cloud-based WMS offers them tailored billing software, flexible and specific workflows and processes to meet individual customer needs, multiple picking/packing approaches to ensure the application can support efficient approaches in structuring and prioritizing work, plus an information-rich portal for enhanced visibility.”
This all combines to provide a very fitting answer to a very complex question: How do I gain the ability to satisfy a variety of customers with differing requirements, without incurring custom coding costs and delays for every new client?
“We bring a base-feature set tailored to 3PL challenges that is highly configurable – even by their own team, after training – to support everything from new customer onboarding to changes they may need in their processes”, added White. “We’ve also standardized our interfaces to support easily understood and accomplished integrations and come to the table with a library of existing applications to help ease 3PL technical sales processes.”