$1M saved by testing fulfillment against the parent company's own network

A successful electronics company purchased by Amazon, whose old network and partners still existed after significant growth. Ships mostly FTL and LTL freight.

Consumer electronics, direct to customer, where half a day of delivery speed is a competitive difference.

We looked past the price to what each 3PL actually runs. Older material handling equipment, out of date interconnectivity and out of date software all show up later as cost, and few fulfillment partners refresh those areas yearly. We ran a comprehensive cost and service analysis for each option and compared it against benchmarks.

We built the client a shortlist rather than a single recommendation. The best partner does not always have capacity in the optimal center, and many buyers assume service and transportation costs stay the same across locations, which is not true. Many potential 3PLs were eliminated because they did not have capacity in the desired locations or expertise in FTL and LTL. Others struggled with new technology and systems. Several still had manual operations, inhibiting flexibility and speed to deliver.

The parent company was not going to hand over the detail, so we reconstructed it from what was available and validated it before a single provider was approached. Without that, every quote would have been compared against a number nobody trusted.