A good 3PL will save you money and reduce your headaches. An amazing 3PL will provide your business competitive advantage to grow your business, enhance your brand equity and increase your margins. This is the first in the first of a series of articles I’m writting to showcase some really cool stuff unique to SCS that we are building or already delivering exclusively to SCS clients.
Drop ship from DC – don’t overlook this, this is going to be a major future logistics model that will help deliver market dominance in your category if you do it brilliantly.
Scenario A, is that you can go to your retail clients and offer them an amazing deal. You can supply direct to their customers delivery point (office, home or convenient pick-up location) from your awesome DC (that would be us) who operates in the high 99 percentile on everything. The retailer does not have to hold stock. The delivery service can be AMAZING (same day, overnight or two days for the South Island) the retailer does not have to hold stock (it’s so good I have to repeat it) if the retailers don’t have it in stock they still get it to their customer blisteringly fast, if they do but the consumer wants it delivered – they can and we can offer a menu of exciting delivery options.
Scenario B, the customer wants an insane delivery service e.g. 90 minutes and they are prepared to pay more for this incredible service. We fulfill this demand direct from our DC.
Scenario C, the customer does not want to pick it up now, they want it delivered to their house tomorrow night between 6 and 9pm. We manage this for your retailer – direct from our DC.
Scenario D, the customer wants it delivered next week on Thursday (this delayed and targeted service is going to be a winner for leading r/e-tailers, you will be hearing more and more about this type of freight service, I have spoken to 3 very large retailers and they see this as becoming as important as the fast delivery options)
There are two reasons why this model does not work for almost everyone in the world (btw we can do it all :))
a) The fulfillment facility does not have B2C fulfillment capability (its a completely different kettle of fish – to achieve our B2C fulfillment speed and low cost structure we have literally spent 100’s of thousands, we have unique processing models that can fulfill consumer orders cheaper than Ezibuy – we’re that good! and as an SCS customer you can have it)
b) The technology base of the warehouse is inadequate to support the delivery promise. This is not only the WMS (warehouse Management System) technology but the integrated FMS (Freight Management System) with the carriers, EDI capability to shoot messages back into the retailers POS (Point of Sale) system, messaging alerts to the consumer to advise of order and shipment progress to provide a wonderful and engaging experience and the all critical returns capability.
For these two reasons most of the world is not leveraging this exciting consumer fulfilment model. Many have learnt the hard way that executing it poorly will deliver the reverse effect and damage brand equity, but executed brilliantly the upside is immense and the good news is that SCS has built all of this for our clients. For around 3 years we have been developing phenomenal B2C fulfilment capability from both a skills based and technology perspective. So use us, if you want more margin, competitive edge, if you want to provide your retailers with more value; talk to us, we can build you a class leading solution that will do all of this and more. Use us to help your retailers secure more sales…of your product.
Dasko uses our 90 minute from order to door service in 7 towns and cities around NZ now, it is so successful they guarantee the service and have turned it into a customer challenge, grown their business massively and taken the march on their competition – all powered by SCS. They have a fancy sales brochure promoting this business and are getting terrific returns. Imagine your retailers with eye popping in-store promotions promoting your products and these amazing capabilities – stand out.
The Iconic is one of Australia’s largest on line-fashion retailers, they launched a 3 hour delivery service in Sydney, the organic press they received was insane, they achieved 83% market awareness as media and social media picked up on the innovation, within 12 months they increased their business 50%.
One of the key take-a-ways I received from the conference last week was that future of retail is supply chain, both the physical and electronic sides of it. You already have the best 3PL in NZ (and many say the Southern Hemisphere) servicing your business, drive us harder to help your business reach even higher levels. We’re game and we have the capability so get creative – drop me a line directly and lets see what cool stuff we can do for you brad@supplycs.com
cheers
Brad
