The State of the Market
Some of the trends recognized in last year's study continued this year. Traditional services like transportation and warehousing remain the most outsourced activities, while outsourcing customerfacing activities and other more strategic services remains substantially less common. Among companies that currently do not outsource logistics, nearly half are contemplating outsourcing at least part of their operation in the future. In the meantime, over a third gives the reason for not outsourcing as being that they see logistics as a core competency. In addition, they do not believe they would save costs if they outsourced parts of their logistics, a fear not supported by the majority of respondents who do outsource and report cost savings that average 13% after outsourcing.

Collaboration
Discussions with logistics executives reveal a gap between the desire to work collaboratively with 3PLs and how to go about it. To drive change and improvement in the overall business relationship, 3PLs and customers must work toward a common set of goals and objectives, and establish a meaningful exchange of information relating to planning, management, execution and performance measurement. Preferably, the collaboration should involve not only 3PLs and their customers, but also the customers' trading partners, and other key stakeholders.
Meaningful personal relationships, including a mutual respect for what each party brings to the table, are crucial, but long-term success requires the effectiveness of sound process and technology to enable success to continue, even when key people involved in the relationship change. The many benefits of successful collaboration should outweigh the financial costs – they should pay for themselves in measurable financial terms.
When asked about which business processes would benefit most from improved collaboration with 3PLs, respondents seemed to associate the greatest benefits with business processes such as inventory management, customer order management, customer service and supplier order management.

This report also includes a maturity model that classifies the attributes of 3PL-customer collaboration as traditional, progressive and leading. We believe this model can be leveraged as a transformation tool that 3PLs and customers can use to develop a joint strategic plan for increasing the extent and the effectiveness of collaboration.

Technology
After years of mediocre comments, the number of users satisfied with 3PL IT performance grew by 7% this year.
This is a positive development, but the IT capabilities of 3PLs remains a top three issue for their customers. As in previous years, warehouse and transportation management systems are the technologies most commonly provided by
3PLs. When we add predicted future growth into the equation, visibility tools and web-enabled communication are expected to become the technologies most used by 3PLs. Expectations for RFID are still high but actual RFID usage remains low, showing only a modest increase over last year. Cost and ease of use of RFID are still major issues. We find some cynicism in the market: is it really going to happen in the near future? Even if the expected future use is included, our survey participants tell us that RFID will still not become a top five technology.

Emerging Markets
The top five expansion destinations for companies remain unchanged, with China and India as clear leaders followed by Russia, Brazil and Poland. But proximity certainly influences choice, with Eastern Europe more popular with European companies while Latin America is more of a choice for those in North America. Asia Pacific companies choose China and India as the main destinations but Vietnam rates as “more interesting” to them than Russia. Latin American companies do look to China to expand but generally not to other countries outsider their own continent.
Despite popular belief, language, IT and cultural differences are not the main obstacles that companies face when dealing with China and India. In India, the biggest challenge is the poor infrastructure, followed by the ability to deliver against promises. In China the latter is considered the biggest problem followed by legislation.
Companies have a variety of planned activities in both countries. India dominates in global process outsourcing, while manufacturing is more oriented towards the domestic market. This is very different from China where manufacturing is the leading sector and drives its huge export. China, seen as a consumer as well as a producer of finished goods, is on its way to becoming the second largest global exporter and is expected to become the number one in 2008.

Plus d'informations : www.3plstudy.com
Crédit photo : © Anatoly Minkov - Fotolia.com