3 Ways a 3PL Can Take Your Business to the Next Level

3 Ways a 3PL Can Take Your Business to the Next Level

Building a business from the ground up is never easy, and neither is scaling your business up to the next level. You’ve got to worry about staffing issues, warehousing for all your products, the costs of packing and shipping to new customers, and more. Sometimes, it can seem nearly impossible to think about scaling up.

With a third-party logistics company, however, growing your business is easier than ever before. Here are 3 ways a 3PL can help you take your business to the next level:

Expertise

Have you jumped into a new geographic market with your products, but you aren’t quite sure how to get items from your warehouse into your customers’ hands quickly and safely? A 3PL knows how, and likely has vast experience shipping to your exact location.

No matter what challenge your business faces in scaling up – staffing, managing new orders, restocking merchandise – your 3PL has people who have been there, done that many times over the years. When you hire a 3PL, you hire years of experience in weathering the speed bumps you’re facing.

Staffing

One of the biggest hurdles to being able to grow your business quickly is facing shortfalls in staffing. You don’t want to hire someone until you’re sure you’ve got the business to support that salary, but you can’t keep up with the extra demand you need to create to bring in that extra revenue.

With a 3PL at your side, you don’t have to worry about hiring people to staff the warehouse; the 3PL takes care of all that! If your business needs extra staffing for a sale, for example, the 3PL just allocates more of their current staff to managing your business needs. You never have to worry about finding the right person, how much they’re being paid, or when they’re taking vacation days. You get the same level of service each and every time.

Space

When you want to grow your business, you know that means you’ll need to have more products and supplies on hand to meet increased orders. If you’re running your business out of your home, office, or small warehouse, the thought of packing any more product in may sound like a nightmare. To be able to handle all the products you need to, you may think it’s time to start investigating prices to rent more warehousing space.

Instead of laying out a heavy chunk of change for warehousing space – especially if your business is located in an area where rents are high – let a 3PL worry about where to store all your products. Your 3PL has access to large amounts of warehousing space, and the space your business’s products take up is expandable depending on your needs. Rather than spend all the money to rent and move into a new space, not to mention the valuable time that project requires, your 3PL can have you ready to expand your stock in a matter of days or even hours!

Expert Warehousing & Logistics on the East Coast

Since 1984, Cannon Hill Logistics has helped small and medium businesses just like yours grow and take things to the next level. Whether you need some extra warehouse space and a few spare hands to handle shipping or you want full-service warehousing and logistics, our skilled team can help you reach your business goals without all the added stress.

We pride ourselves on building custom solutions suited to each individual business’s needs. Let us build you a quote today!

5 Reasons You Need to Forecast for Effective Supply Chain Management

5 Reasons You Need to Forecast for Effective Supply Chain Management

While there may be a never-ending list of unknowns – snowstorms, supply shortages, skyrocketing oil prices – that you can’t prepare your business for, taking some time to dial in your supply chain forecasting is essential to the overall health and growth of your business.

If you don’t keep an eye on whether your supply is managed effectively, you could be losing serious money, which means your business will grow more slowly than you’d like.

Here are 5 reasons you need to forecast for effective supply chain management:

 

Optimize Your Inventory

You know that having too low a stock on a hot item can be a death knell for sales. And having too much of something that’s not selling eats up money with storage, transportation, and other costs. By looking carefully at your sales and your supply chain and then predicting when you’ll need how much of a product, you’re saving your business money in overstocking and maintaining sales that would be lost to understocking.

 

Customer Satisfaction

Having happy customers is always the goal of any business, right? Most customers are pretty forgiving, and understand if something’s going to be out of stock for a short time. However, with effective supply chain management through forecasting, you can prevent many of these product shortages, giving you happier customers.

 

Improve Resource Scheduling

With increased demand comes an increased need for all those resources necessary to getting products to customers – staff, warehouse space, and transportation, for example. If you can predict when you will need more people and resources to meet customer demands, you will decrease interruptions in the shipping process and get products to your customers in a timely manner. On the flip side, if you can forecast a seasonal dip in ordering, you can adjust your staffing needs accordingly to save money.

 

Decrease Costs

It’s expensive to keep a stash of extra products, even a small one, on hand. It can also be dangerous, depending on where and how you store them. By forecasting your supply needs, you’ll be able to avoid unnecessary expenditures on stocking and warehousing too many products. This improves your bottom line and preserves extra money for those times when you do see demand tick up and need more stock.

 

Enhance Transportation Logistics

Combining shipments or transportation methods to save money is all well and good, but with forecasting you can improve the product transport process even farther. If you have a handle on when you’ll see increased demand for certain products, you can create a full transportation strategy to help eliminate redundancies and decrease costs.

 

Experienced Supply Chain Management Support in Maryland

At Cannon Hill Logistics, we want to see your business succeed. Whether you need warehousing and shipping support, or you need someone to handle order receipt and returns processing, we can create a custom logistics solution to meet your needs. Contact us today to discuss your unique needs so your business can thrive!