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Re: RE: Third Party Logistics (3PL)
In an effort to respond to EDI and 3PL, I would make the following suggestion to
anyone looking to outsource logistic services.
Make sure you have a tight Service Level Agreement (SLA), that is bound to your
contract.
Depending upon your level of integration and services your 3PL provides for you,
data timeliness, accuracy, up time, fail over, VAN, translation software
support, and a ton of other issues should be addressed. I cannot think of a
bigger issue then a 3PL providing a JIT warehouse to a manufacturing lines and
the 3PL decides to upgrade their EDI software and not completing so your pulls
requests are not met and your line goes down.
The purpose of the SLA should be to protect you from having such a situation,
but it may occur no matter what. You just want to make sure you recoup some
money and that you have some out if the 3PL continues to fail. You should
almost treat the 3PL as an extension of your company and maintain at least the
same quality levels that you have in your own organization, maybe even higher
standards.
For the 3PL folks out there, this SLA should cover issues that your customer may
cause. Such as failed sends of the order data, upgrading maps or guidelines at
a moments notice and expecting you to put all your resource to making it happen
in a unrealistic timeframe.
John
----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Olivola
To: 'EDI-L Mailing List'
Sent: Tuesday, December 30, 2003 5:46 PM
Subject: RE: RE: [EDI-L] Third Party Logistics (3PL)
There is no single answer to this. There are company owned and operated
warehouses that are very efficient and the company has an excellent
transportation system in place to back it up. There are 3PL situations
where the responsiveness is haphazard. I think the decision is entirely
dependent on the individual circumstance which makes benchmarking rather
pointless.
On the EDI side, it's equally pointless. EDI involving a 3PL can be done
well or poorly. One thing that seems to fit into this scenario (3PL) is the
use of outsourced EDI. It makes the EDI source/destination issues
completely transparent to all parties. Again, it really depends on the
quality of the implementation.
Peter Olivola
708 445 0023
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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