Outsourcing warehousing and distribution to a 3PL (Third-party logistics provider) carries with it numerous benefits for the enterprising business owner or manager. It’s a long held rule of savvy
business: If someone else can do it more efficiently, it’s probably worth letting them do it. By leveraging the strengths of a 3PL in optimizing your warehousing and distribution, you can refine your business to new heights—and new profits. Here are just a few reasons to consider third-party warehousing and distribution:

Shared Costs

Sharing a resource means sharing the expenses—without losing anything in the exchange. With third-party logistics, the equipment, resources, and man-hours that would go wasted if you handled the matter in-house end up tasked to others; that increased efficiency would put money in your pocket even if a 3PL had nothing else to offer over in-house warehousing and distribution.

Specialists

The people working at a 3PL firm are specialists, from top to bottom. Specialists in warehousing and distribution, and the administration thereof, with the latest tools, techniques, and industry news at their fingertips. Who do you expect to be better at maintaining a top-notch logistics solution: someone who handles logistics as part of a broader set of duties, or a specialist who wakes up to logistics, eats logistics for breakfast, works logistics all day, has logistics for dinner, and dreams of logistics overnight—because that’s what it takes to keep their clients happy? When you put specialists to work on a task, instead of leaving it as a mere part of the responsibilities of a general worker, you get better results: faster, more efficient logistics. Faster, more efficient warehousing and distribution makes companies money.

Reduced Investment

If you don’t already have your own logistics worked out, or they’re in dire need of an update, then you’re facing a far smaller investment working with third party logistics. There’s no land or equipment to buy, no licenses to pay for, no staff to train, no wasted hours anywhere at all. For some companies, having a fully equipped and trained in-house logistics division might make sense, but does the investment required to reach that point make as much sense?

Less Administration

Any time you outsource to a reputable firm, you find yourself with less paperwork, less overhead, fewer legal considerations and fewer time wasters period. By outsourcing your warehousing and distribution, you offload one of the most paperwork-intensive segments of any company. You’ll still have the records and data you require whenever you require it—but managing it, maintaining it, filing it, those won’t be your concern.

Improved Focus

A company that spreads itself too thin loses something in the process; we talked about the benefits of setting specialists to a task such as logistics, but it’s worth considering the fact that generalization cuts both ways: If your employees, top to bottom, can focus entirely on their products, marketing, the business of THEIR industry, without putting themselves to the problem of logistics, then they in turn become more specialized, more focused, on the tasks that are most important to the company’s success.

Final Thoughts

In the end, outsourcing your warehousing and distribution comes to one word: Efficiency. You improve the efficiency of your logistics, you improve the efficiency of your non-logistics workers, you seize on the improvements of efficiency possible when you share a resource you quite simply don’t need 24/7. When you don’t have to buy equipment, don’t have to train logistics personnel, don’t have to distract your workers with those issues, then your bottom line benefits. It’s just common sense.