3PL value added services (or VAS’s), are additional services offered by 3PL providers, beyond the fundamental storage and shipping of products, that are tailored to their clients’ unique needs and specific products.
VAS’s may be deployed at all stages of the value chain, and help to streamline the logistics process for each client, ease logistical challenges, and add value to, and maximise the efficiency of, their supply chains.
At Delamode, we conduct VAS’s at both of our facilities, in Southampton UK and Roosendaal Netherlands. So, wherever your products are positioned, whatever the location of your retailers/customers, you can take advantage of these value-packed services.
Delamode’s Approach to 3PL Value Added Services
Our VAS’s
At Delamode, we offer a range of 3PL value added services, which for the purpose of this blog, can be categorised into two groups: goods-related services, and process-related services.
- Customisation & Rework
- Packaging & Repackaging
- Labelling
- One System, 2 Territories
- Customs Support
- Retailer Compliance
Tailored Approach
Inline with our dedication to offering VAS’s tailored to your unique requirements, the conventions and requirements of all our 3PL value added services are established during the onboarding and implementation phase, when we:
- Work with your internal teams to define your specific product requirements, and identify the ideal VAS process flows and approval mechanisms.
- Create tailored SOPs for each VAS, and establish instructions for our warehouse teams to follow.
- Carry out test runs where appropriate/required.
We hold regular review meetings, which offer the opportunity to collaboratively update or refine VAS processes as your retail or ecommerce strategies evolve.
Goods-Related VAS’s
Customisation & Rework
Our Customisation & Rework service was designed to enhance the efficiency, compliance, and presentation of goods before they reach your retailers or B2C consumers, ensuring that your goods meet retailer and market requirements, and customer expectations.
Customisation may cover placing goods in gift wrapping, assembling multi-SKU product bundles and deploying kitting services for retail environments, and creating custom packaging or creating subscription boxes for D2C ecommerce orders.
Rework may cover restacking/reboxing damaged or mislabelled pallets, and replacing/updating in-box inserts and content.
This important 3PL value added service enables you to adapt generic stock for multiple channels from a single facility (negating the need for offsite handling), and helps to support customer satisfaction, reduce rejected shipments, and minimise the incurrence of fines.
Client-tailored customisation and rework is conducted either post-inbound (B2B) or pre-shipping (B2C), by our dedicated pre-retail teams who operate under strict SOPs to ensure quality, accuracy, and speed.
Packaging & Repackaging
Our flexible Packaging and Repackaging service, support organisations with a varied range of operational and packing requirements, and covers:
- Packaging: Preparing your products for retail or D2C consumers, ensuring packaging is secure and compliant with retailer requirements.
- Repackaging: Repackaging your damaged or returned (non-compliant) goods, or adapting products for different channels or international markets.
- Co-packing: Creating custom ecommerce bundles, or retail-ready multi-packs and promotional kits to support retail campaigns.
This important 3PL value added service, delivered by our packing, retail or rework teams, offers your business a huge number of benefits:
- Ensures your compliance with retail and marketplace requirements and minimises damaged or returned goods.
- Increases your operational agility by enabling you to adapt products quickly for different channels or campaigns.
- Offers cost efficient benefits as products don’t need to be returned to you for packaging, repacking or co-packing, saving time and transport costs.
- Enhances inventory optimisation, as repacking and co-packing can transform slow moving or returned inventory for resale.
- Supports brand consistency, by ensuring that all of your outbound products reflect your brand, and deliver the desired customer experience.
Labelling
Our labelling service covers applying barcodes or QR codes, adding retail price labels, affixing shipping or compliance labels, adding territory/language-specific labelling for international markets to your products, or relabelling them due to branding or regulatory changes.
This essential 3PL value added service, helps to:
- Ensure your compliance with retailer, legal, or territory-specific labelling requirements.
- Increase the efficiency of your supply chain by ensuring your products are retail-ready.
- Support promotional campaigns, or territory-specific product adaptations, without having to rework the product or packaging.
- Offer cost saving benefits by tackling an important task that would otherwise have to be handled by your organisation in-house.
Process-Related VAS’s
Retailer Compliance
Our onboarding and account management teams work with you to establish any retailer requirements that may be different to those we currently operate in line with. This helps our pre-retail staff to ensure that your labelling, pallet loading specs, and deliveries are compliant with the requirements of your retailers.
This important 3PL value added service can help your organisation to avoid large fines, loss of sales, ease the financial cost of having to reposition stock that has been denied or returned back to you by your retailers, and help protect and develop your retailer relationships.
Customs Support
Customs support might be one of the most important 3PL value added services we offer, helping to guide the timely, effective distribution of your goods.
Our transport team supports you to navigate the clearance of goods, incoterms, and help to ensure that your products comply with customs requirements when shipping products to the EU or territories across the rest of the world.
However, It’s not only our transport team who are concerned with customs requirements, our pre-retail team helps to ensure that goods are handled and packed appropriately, inline with relevant SOPs, to support the smooth clearance and shipment of your goods, and the efficiency of your supply chain.
With this VAS, we provide the customs expertise and capabilities often delivered by third party organisations, to pass on operational and logistical savings to your organisation.
One System, 2 Territories
This point is perhaps the least conventional in our offering of VAS’s, because it isn’t strictly a service. Though it’s an important solution, and a central part of Delamode’s offering, that offers a whole lot of value to clients every day.
We use a single powerful WMS (Blue Yonder) across both our AEO-accredited facilities in Southampton UK, and Roosendaal Netherlands, which offers unrivalled visibility of your supply chain.
With our daily shuttle service, our system enables you to move your products between UK and EU markets and customs jurisdictions within 24 hours, to position your stock closer to retailers or D2C customers.
If your current partner’s 3PL value added services aren’t driving your business forward, contact Delamode today to discuss your 3PL needs, and learn how our bonded and non-bonded warehousing, ecommerce fulfilment (including reverse logistics), freight shipping and tailored VAS’s can help transform your supply chain.
