Here are the official results of our first, proper survey, incidentally we used Survey Monkey and it was great.

(remember you can click on the image for a larger view of it)

This next graph showed 84% of our clients believe that SCS has saved them up to 50%.  Note the 20% category (in brown) believe the logistics costs are higher but when you factor in the increased service levels, overall we are less expensive (Total Cost of Ownership). A good example of this would be one of our new clients (from late last year) Peter Coory who owns a very successful B2C company called Innovative Solutions believed that by moving to SCS his customer service calls dropped by 80% because our freight network is so good. This is a point that we always try to stress if we cant win on price alone, as a provider that operates at the quality end of the market, there are frequently  material indirect savings like this to be enjoyed that should be seriously considered in the ‘mix’.

This next image is split into 2 different images. The interesting elements of this part of the survey were that very people ever tried to factor in hidden costs, disappointingly few ever did robust reference checking and alarmingly few used a weighted scorecard and virtually no one bothers to try and understand the long term pricing strategies of the 3PL provider.  Something like 85% of 3PL partner selections fail to deliver to expectation, most of this misalignment could be avoided if these 4 things were executed diligently. For over 50% of our clients we are the proverbial ambulance at the bottom of the cliff and many would have avoided the cliff with a more strategic procurement approach rather than relying on a ‘shallow’ rates calculation and salesman pitch. To this end will be posting a detailed scorecard in the  future for 3PL purchasers soon to help them avoid many of the pitfalls, its tedious work a bit like reference checking staff but don such an important part of your business it can easily save tens or hundreds of thousands.

This next bit is great, it shows 91% of SCS clients are either satisfied or very satisfied – we’re working on the other 8.7%!

And we found out that 45% of SCS are red wine drinkers!