For small businesses, navigating logistics in an efficient and cost-effective way can feel like an impossible task. With little to no logistics expertise, no established infrastructure, and the budgetary and scaling issues that plague most small businesses, where do businesses turn to?
3PL partners like Delamode offer end-to-end small business logistics services to help optimise your supply chain and support your growth. While this may differ amongst providers, at Delamode, these services typically cover:
- Warehousing – Both bonded and non-bonded storage of your products until they are picked. This includes inventory management in a variety of forms.
- Order fulfilment – Goods are picked and packed, VAS’s deployed, and packages are labelled ready for delivery.
- Transportation – The delivery of your products to the retailer or customer, and the movement of goods between distribution centres.
- Reverse logistics – Managing product returns to support customer experience.
- Client management – A team or contact to manage your account, answer queries and nurture your relationship.
Logistical Challenges for Small Businesses
Small business logistics services, like ours, aim to ease the common challenges small businesses face managing their supply chains without the help of an experienced partner. Here’s how.
- Expertise, Resources & Infrastructure – Small businesses lack the in-house logistics knowledge, systems, resources and infrastructure required to create an efficient, optimised supply chain that unburdens you to focus on growth. Enter your trusted 3PL partner.
- Squeezed Budgets – Smaller scale delivery costs can be crippling, and large overheads and inflexible contracts are impractical for small businesses. While 3PL’s vary, our small business logistics services offer cost certainty and scalability, and offer flexible solutions where costs scale with growth, with no fixed commitments.
- Agility – Small businesses are more exposed to seasonal peaks, supply chain disruptions and changing customer expectations. A trusted 3PL should continuously review their processes to meet and exceed customer needs, and offer flexible solutions that can help you scale up or down in response to demand, or to navigate disruption as required.
- Returns – Returns present their own set of challenges for small businesses. Small business logistics services like ours encompass reverse logistics to manage returns quickly and efficiently, provide you with full visibility of your returns, and help you recover value from your stock.
- Visibility – Small businesses typically can’t afford the required investment in advanced systems. At Delamode, our powerful system provides you with real-time visibility of your stock, deliveries, returns and reporting, without the investment.
- B2C Customer Expectations – Customers demand increasingly better experiences from the brands they purchase from, in the form of flexible, fast and smooth deliveries and returns. 3PL partners like us have established carrier networks and extensive fulfilment capabilities that enable you to compete with larger players on service quality and customer experience.
The Benefits of Small Business Logistics Services
- Optimised operations – Via established processes, powerful technology and expert support, you can focus on growth while your chosen provider guides the smooth and efficient journey of your goods.
- Cost savings – By leveraging shared networks, warehousing space, and carrier agreements, small business logistics helps you to benefit from economies of scale you could not achieve alone.
- Scalability and flexibility – When working with a trusted 3PL like Delamode, you can flex your service-level up or down to meet seasonal peaks, unexpected changes in demand and support promotional campaigns.
- Competitive advantage & customer satisfaction – Enabling you to offer your customers efficient and reliable delivery and returns that rival those of larger more established brands. This helps to support your market positioning, and promote repeat purchases.
- Risk reduction – Small business logistics partners help to support your compliance and customs/regulatory requirements, helping you avoid costly errors or fines.
- Advanced technology without the investment – While 3PL’s differ, we offer a powerful WMS that provides real-time visibility and control of your inventory, orders and returns, as well as real time tracking and reporting. Technological capabilities you’re unlikely to afford independently.
- Sustainability – Logistics partners today offer a range of sustainable supply chain solutions. At Delamode, these come in the forms of consolidated shipments, route optimisation and recycling options, to help you meet your environment goals. We’re sustainable by design, with a flagship facility in Southampton that is EPC-requirement ready and features a 467,000 sq ft solar panel system.
Our Approach to Small Business Logistics
We understand that for small businesses, embarking on a relationship with a 3PL partner can be daunting. Can they really offer you the time, care and attention a growing business needs?
At Delamode, we’re focussed on building long term relationships, and have supported some of our clients for over 20 years. We work with clients from the earliest stages of their journey, and serve as a key facilitator of your growth, providing you with the same care and support that our big-name-brand clients receive.
Our small business logistics services help to turn down the pressure, enabling you to flex service-levels to meet your budgetary requirements and to help you respond quickly to demand, and provide you with a level of support and infrastructure that would be otherwise unobtainable.
However, this only scrapes the surface of what makes us a great partner for small businesses.
- Cost-effective shared services – Benefit from shared bonded and non-bonded warehousing, shared carrier contracts and economies of scale, to keep costs under control.
- Port-centric model – Our Southampton facility is on the dock-side, which helps to cut time, cost and carbon from your supply chain and support its efficiency. A Port-centric model supports the fast and efficient movement of goods, and minimises unnecessary transport miles, empty container miles, carbon, emissions, delivery times, delivery costs and more.
- Two facilities & shuttle service – If our flagship UK facility wasn’t enough, our small business logistics services provide you access to the EU market and ROTW via our facility in Roosendaal, Netherlands. No need to commit to a space you’re unlikely to need “full-time”. With our daily shuttle service, you can transport your stock between our facilities as demand requires.
- Flexible fulfilment – For ecommerce SMEs, our pick and pack services, reverse logistics solutions (returns) and flexible freight shipping services ensure that your customers get the same fast, reliable service they’d expect from a big retailer.
- Value added services – We deploy VAS’s in-house. These value added services drive value beyond our core services, by efficiently and expertly managing complex, costly, hard-to-implement processes like: customisation, rework, packaging, repackaging, co-packing and labelling.
- Systems & visibility – We make visibility and control of your stock and deliveries, via advanced technology, part of the service.
Contact our team today to discuss how our small business logistics services can support your organisation and its unique 3PL requirements.
