How 3PL Providers Ensure Quality Control and Accuracy

If you decide to partner with a 3PL provider, you will be in good hands when it comes to the quality control and accuracy of your orders. In the UK, a 3PL provider aims for at least 99% picking accuracy (if not, higher), and therefore thrives in ensuring your customers receive the right order, fast and safely. With 3PL, the client and their customers will always come first, and therefore the quality and control checks are crucial.

Through advanced technologies and highly trained staff, you can put your trust in 3PL providers to store, pick, pack and ship your orders to your customers. When dealing with logistics in-house, it can be difficult to ensure each order is carefully picked and quality check and therefore can eventually hurt a brands reputation and growth if mistakes continue to happen. This blogpost is going to dive into exactly how 3PL providers will ensure your logistics is handled with accuracy and care.

Some of the key methods used by 3PL include:

Inspections on Arrival

Once your stock arrives at your chosen 3PL’s warehouse, this will go through a quality check to ensure the condition and standards of your products are good enough to be sent to customers. They will look for any damaged or defective items and ensure these are discarded immediately. If you sell any food products, or items that may go out of date, there will be a thorough hygiene check of these, and staff will ensure all items are still in date (these will also be checked regularly to ensure all out of date items are discarded in the correct way, such as recycling). Once your stock has been thoroughly checked, it can begin to be loaded in the bays of the warehouse.

High Quality Management Systems

3PL providers will have access to some of the highest quality WMS (warehouse management systems) to ensure they have real-time tracking of all inventory levels, orders and returns. Ensuring that you know how much stock is going in and out of the warehouse is crucial as it can minimise any risk of stock discrepancies and avoids you over or under ordering more stock. Not only is this useful for ensuring you do not over-sell items and allow them to go out of stock (leaving customers very unhappy), but this also ensures you are fully aware of your demand, the amount of missing or damaged stock, and allows you to grow and learn from all orders to ensure you’re constantly improving.

For example, if you have an item which is constantly being damaged in transit, this is a key indicator you may need to change your packaging to ensure it being delivered safely. By having real-time tracking systems, you and your 3pl can keep up with all this data, to ensure you’re always improving.

Regular Quality Control Checks

These regular checks can be done in several ways by your 3PL. They may do batch tracking (this is when you track batches to quickly identify issues with products and can isolate these before selling), and this is something that is done when working with food or even pharmaceutical products.

They may also decide to do random sampling tests regularly on products (this involves implementing random sampling procedures on large samples of products to ensure there are no defects) and this is less time consuming than checking every single product that comes in. This may be done on clothing products, or large product lines that are all delivered from the same shipment and are identical.

Finally, a lot of 3PL’s will conduct quality control checks throughout the whole picking process. Whether this be when handling, picking, packing, or loading, it will be checked by several staff members before being sent out to customers, ensuring that mistakes are minimised as much as possible.

Return Management

The returns process is one of the most important things to deal with when it comes to logistics as you must be sure that your items are arriving back to the warehouse safely and undamaged, as you do not want to resell or restock items that are faulty to other customers. A 3PL will give you the option to handle all returns for you and will have a procedure to do so, to ensure all stock is being checked thoroughly before refunding your customers. The minute your return arrives at the 3PL fulfilment centre, the helpful warehouse team will assess the item and ensure it is perfect quality before popping it back onto your inventory for it to be resold. A 3PL provider will ensure that quality checks are always in place within the supply chain, as you want to avoid any customer dissatisfaction.

Benefits of 3PL Quality Control

There are so many benefits to partnering with a 3PL provider, but the quality control and accuracy of letting a third-party handle your logistics can have a knock-on effect on your business growth. Not only will your customers be happier, but you can save your business huge shipping, returns and damage costs by accurately sending out orders.

The key benefits include:

• Save HUGE costs throughout the supply chain.
• Minimise waste and damaged goods (as well as return costs).
• Improve your brand's reputation.
• Build stronger relationships with customers.
• Regulatory compliance by adhering to necessary quality standards (this is particularly important for brands who sell food or pharmaceutical products).

If you do decide to do your own in-house logistics, you may take on the risk of orders not being sent out accurately to customers, and as your business grows and scales, it can be hard to keep up with the large volume of orders. Read our blogpost on in-house logistics vs 3PL now, and you can decide which feels better for your business.

Choosing GNOC

So, you’re now wanting to partner with a 3PL provider right? Well, here at GNOC we are ready to work with you and help your business grow and scale. We are a 3PL provider based in Durham, UK, and we thrive on helping businesses with their logistics and orders. We are proud to say that we have shipped over 1,000,000 orders in the last 12 months and have a 99% picking accuracy rate. With years of experience in eCommerce, our priority is your business and your customers, as we know how hard it can be to build and grow a brand.

You can contact us today, or fill out our form here, and one of our helpful team can get back to you with the best 3PL and fulfilment options for you.

Let’s supercharge your growth today…