The 4 fears of outsourcing your fulfilment: No 1. Loss of Control

Losing control of your business is a very real fear when you are considering outsourcing fulfilment to a third party.

When moving your goods and products to a 3PL provider, they’re doing the picking and packing and shipping for you. You’re no longer in control of that entirely. It’s not your employees doing it, it’s somebody else’s. Even if you’re a large organisation with multiple warehouses, with lots of warehousing departments and employees, they still are your employees and they answer directly to you.

Outsourcing that critical part of the value chain, the bit that hands over your product to your hard-won customers, can be terrifying. And it should be, because this is important stuff. Getting it wrong means that all the hard work you do in marketing and building up your customer base can be destroyed. So, what to do? How do you move forward with confidence.

Firstly, it’s vital to acknowledge that there is no way of getting around the fact that you’re going to lose some direct control. The people handling your goods will no longer report directly to you, as they won’t be your employees.

How can you try to overcome this fear?

The key is to find a provider that emulates the experience of having your own employees doing the picking and packing as closely as possible. Here at TFP, we do this by having our account managers (the people looking after the relationship), being the actual people that pick and pack for you. They may have others helping them out, and if you’re a big customer, you may need multiple people. But, we don’t have customer service people to go through, or a customer service desk that sits between you and the frontline warehouse staff. This means you can get an instant response to your urgent enquiries.

Each of our warehousing team have primary accounts that they spend most of their day working on. This ensures that they get to know each one of their primary accounts. They’ll also have secondary accounts to cover people when they’re on holiday or when they’re off sick, so when the primary account manager is off, there will be a secondary account manager that can take over and has experience with those accounts.

This mean you will always have somebody that you can talk to, knows what they’re doing, and has experience in picking, packing, and shipping your orders.

That method, we find, as closely as possible replicates the kind of relationship you would have with your own warehousing department if it were in-house and if they were your employees. Our employees will act as closely as possible as if they were your own employees/

If that sounds a good way of working, and if that alleviates some of that very natural trepidation you might feel about outsourcing something as important as your warehousing and logistics, then please give us a call to discuss the benefits of 3PL and our person-focused/human centric approach to that business.