One portal. Clear billing. Measurable SLA performance Most 3PL portals are glorified spreadsheet dumps. You log in, you see a table of SKUs and quantities, and you leave knowing roughly what you knew before. That's not a portal. That's a file with a password. If you're building one or evaluating one, here's the standard that actually matters to the people on the other end of it — your clients. On the inventory side, real-time on-hand is table stakes. What clients actually nee

Signing with a 3PL without asking the right questions first is how a company ends up paying for a relationship that doesn't work and can't easily get out of it. Most contracts run 24 to 36 months. That's a long time to find out the hard way. Start with inventory visibility. Ask them specifically how cycle counts are conducted, who initiates them, how often, and what system they use to record results. If the answer is vague — "we use our WMS" — push harder. What WMS? How doe