THIRD-PARTY LOGISTICS — SOUTHWESTERN ONTARIO
The trailer is unloaded against an advance notice that does not quite match what came off it. A unit goes out wrong and comes back as a return, a chargeback and a scored miss. Count and system disagree, and finding out why means a person walking the racks. We put the check at the moment the unit is handled, so the error is caught where it is made and not billed back to you a month later.
Free · 20 minutes · no commitment
Every unit in the building belongs to somebody else, arrived on somebody else's paperwork, and is scored against somebody else's system. When the two disagree, it is your people who walk the racks and your margin that absorbs it. The fix is not more checking — it is checking at the moment the unit is handled, when the answer is still cheap.
The headcount you add for volume, not for errors.
None of these are measurements of your warehouse — we have not seen it. They are the five places a third-party operation loses money that a manufacturer running the same volume would not, because none of the inventory is yours and all of the accuracy is your problem.
Every one of these was answered with a check at the end, where an error costs the most to find and the least to prevent.
01
Book it in, sort it later
Receiving is judged on how fast the door is cleared, so a discrepancy found at the dock costs the receiver time they are measured against. The rational move is to book it in and sort it out later — except later is a cycle count three weeks on, by which time nobody can say which shipment it came from.
02
A second check at pack
The picker was never the problem — the check was, and it sat at the end where finding an error costs the most. Adding a second check at pack slows the line without moving the error rate much, because it is the same person looking at the same label a second time.
03
Cycle counting
Cycle counting samples; it does not explain. It tells you the number is wrong without telling you which movement made it wrong, so the investigation starts from scratch every time and is never quite finished before the next one.
04
Writing it down under pressure
Capturing accessorial work depends on somebody writing it down while they are in the middle of doing it, usually because a customer is standing there asking for a favour. The work that is hardest to record is exactly the work done under pressure — so the busiest weeks bill the least accurately.
05
A monthly spreadsheet
The data is spread across the warehouse system, the carrier's tracking and a spreadsheet somebody maintains. Assembling it is a monthly job, which means a slipping quarter is visible only once the quarter has slipped and the customer has already noticed.
Owner’s View
Tuesday, 9:20 in the building
YOUR BUILDING · 4 CLIENTS · UPDATED 9:20 · SHOWN WITH LIVE REFRESH, A SEPARATELY QUOTED UPGRADE
Pick accuracy · this week
99.6%
▲ 0.1 pts· On track
Three mis-picks, all caught at pack.
Dock appointments on time
92%
▼ 3 pts· Needs you
Two carriers arrived outside their slot this morning.
Accessorial work not billed
$2,140
▲ $310 this week· Needs you
Re-wraps on Monday are not captured yet.
Inventory variance
0.4%
▼ 0.1 pts· On track
Every move recorded, so each variance comes with its cause.
Needs you today
Receiving vs ASN
1 short against the ASN at door 4 · Operations
Client onboarding
SKU form 80% complete · Sales & intake
Dock appointments
2 arrived outside their slot · Operations
Forklift & incidents
In 21 days · Quality & compliance
3PL & WAREHOUSING · OPERATIONS BLUEPRINT
Each floor is a department and each station a process. The bright line is the path one job takes, and the light travelling it is that job. Select any station to see what starts it, what the system does, and what stays with a person.
YOUR ADDITIONS · THE MAP IS YOURS TO EXTEND
Anything you run, or wish you ran, that is not drawn above. Name it, say where it sits, and it appears on the model with a blueprint sheet of its own. It travels with your pilot-call booking, so the call starts from your map, not ours. No price is attached; it is scoped on the call.
Blueprint sheet · live preview
Marketing · Work arrives · A person approves each one
A poster is drafted from the week's work, a person approves it, and it is scheduled and posted to each channel on a calendar.
Twenty minutes. No deck.
This page is written from the fundamentals we run on our own fleet — receiving, proof, billing — and from how third-party warehousing is contracted, not from a 3PL client. The board above describes mechanisms, not measurements, and every figure the calculator shows is your own.
WHY US
We are not a consultancy that read about AI and wrote a deck. We build and operate the automation behind our own Ontario transport operation — built inside our own business first — and it runs every day whether or not anybody is watching it.
That operation moves people on vehicles; yours moves goods through a building. Dispatch and tracking transfer directly. The warehouse floor does not, and we say so.
What transfers is the machinery, and the expensive mistakes that come with it. The vehicle that clipped a geofence while driving past and marked a stop it never made. The stale data feed that hid whole trips. The alert that fired on one bad GPS reading. Every one of those is a way an automated system embarrasses you in front of a customer, and every one was found and fixed on our vehicles, not yours.
If this is your week, twenty minutes settles whether a Diagnostic would find anything worth fixing.
Book a pilot callHow many orders you handle a month, how many go out wrong, what one costs you once the credit and the chargeback land, and how much work leaves the building without reaching an invoice. The calculator works from those and nothing else.
OPEN THE 3PL LEAK CALCULATOR →What actually comes off the trailer is matched to the notice at the door, so a discrepancy is raised while the trailer is still there and the shipment it belongs to is not in question — instead of surfacing at a cycle count three weeks on.
By matching the unit to the order at the moment it is handled, not inspecting it again at the end. A second check at pack slows the line without moving the error rate much, because it is the same person looking at the same label again.
Yes. Every movement is recorded where it happens, so a variance arrives with the movement that caused it attached, and the walk is a check, not a search. It does not count for you; it makes the count shorter.
The work is captured as it is performed, not reconstructed at month end, so what leaves the building and what appears on the invoice are the same list. It does not decide what to bill — it puts the list in front of whoever prices it.
No. It works on top of what you already run, not instead of it. It puts a check next to your warehouse system, where the unit is handled, and it cannot fix an error a customer's own ASN created — but you will be able to prove that. The first engagement is an Operations Diagnostic of the whole business, with one number taken from the part that costs most, measured against your error rate, your accuracy against contract and your unbilled work.
Book a pilot call. Tell us where the week goes wrong, and we’ll tell you what an Operations Diagnostic would map and measure.
The first paid step has a clear scope and an end date, and the pilot after it is one workflow — not a platform, and not an open-ended retainer.
Free · 20 minutes · no commitment
