Customer fulfillment, also known as order fulfillment, requires business strategies in order to do what is needed; getting products and services delivered to customers in a timely and accurate manner. There are many strategies that 3PLs come up with and they have to be custom tailored to each of the businesses that they partner with. These strategies are primarily needed to ensure that scaling is always in the front of everyone’s mind.

Order fulfillment has a lot of different components, but it refers to all the steps that happen behind the scenes after an order is received and how it gets to the hands of the customer. This involves warehousing to receive goods before picking and packing the product when an order is placed, then it is shipped as an email is sent to the customer letting them know it is out for delivery.

When you partner with a 3PL, there will be some costs that require explanation. These costs involve storing inventory, processing orders, and everything involved in shipping among some other things like technology installation, returns management, kitting, etc. Without a 3PL, there are still in-house costs. This includes the cost of labor, infrastructure costs, and materials.

A fulfillment agent simply refers to the party involved in the processing of receiving, packaging, and shipping orders to customers. The term is mostly used in the Ecommerce space even though any company involved in selling products directly to customers is dealing with fulfillment. Fulfillment agents are the key to a brand’s success.

Yes! While there are a variety of different costs when partnering with a 3PL, shipping is included among other things. 3PLs like Spectra take on the time, effort, and cost of managing warehouses with advanced systems and technology in place to manage everything to do with shipping and fulfillment. This isn’t something that you will need to worry about anymore.

Similar to the question about fulfillment activities, Ecommerce fulfillment refers to the entire process that goes on behind the scenes after an order is placed online and how it gets to the hands of the customer. The part of the supply chain that your 3PL plays in this process is key, involving receiving and storing inventory, managing orders, picking and packing, shipping, and returns management

This is a great question and we get it a lot. Kitting is actually an inventory technique where individual but related products are packaged together as a bundle before being shipped. This is very useful because rather than having multiple different manufacturers involved, everything can be put into one package, saving both time and money.

The Supply Chain Council has a special definition for order fulfillment. It is described as the discrete measurement of orders delivered accurately at the right time in the ideal condition to the correct customer along with the correct invoice. When any of these conditions aren’t met, the order is not “perfect”.

Warehouse cycle time refers to the time involved in processing received inventory, which includes accounting for it, sorting it by category, and storing it. The better the 3PL, the faster this is done in an accurate and efficient manner. It’s something very difficult to optimize in-house and sincerely requires professionals. The exact formula is the total time spent on sorting received stock divided by the total number of received items.

A warehouse is a much broader term, and a business working in-house could even consider their garage their warehouse. It’s simply a place to store goods. However, a fulfillment center is more specific. It’s the place specifically built in order to receive, pick, pack, kit, ship, and manage returns in.