As Senior Revenue Officer at DCL Logistics, I’m often asked the questions: Why DCL? What makes DCL better, different, the best choice for me? While my answer varies depending on the needs of that individual or company, our approach and values have always been the same.
The Current State of Logistics
The way in which businesses need to get their products into customers’ hands is increasingly more complex. To run a product company is to constantly readjust your aim at the always-moving target of faster, cheaper distribution, and increasingly higher demands of customer satisfaction. This is due to the growth of new marketplaces, the emphasis on ecommerce channels, a demand for faster transit times, and the seemingly infinite number of commerce touchpoints. Finding the right fulfillment partner to become your logistics manager and company advocate can be the difference between a disastrous supply chain experience or a healthy, growing company with a loyal customer base.
Googling “fulfillment partner” or “3PL provider” brings up hundreds of ads, and thousands of results for fulfillment providers. Sorting through these options and identifying a fulfillment partner who will best meet your needs can be a daunting task. Most fulfillment companies, often referred to as third-party logistics providers (3PLs), can simply only pick, pack, and ship your product. However, finding a 3PL partner that understands and cares about your business can truly help you grow by adapting quickly to your ever-changing needs, knowing the best ways to introduce your products to new sales channels, and providing comprehensive turnkey solutions for challenges that may arise. Can you put a price tag on peace of mind?
Why DCL? What Makes DCL Different?
Simply put, for 37 years, we’ve built our business by providing high quality, flexible fulfillment solutions at scale. From startups to public companies, our customer service, technology, and operations has been setup to adapt to our customers’ needs, not the other way around.
Our core values have been tried and tested for decades; the entire DCL team lives these out every single day, working toward the singular goal of providing the best logistics service possible for our customers.
Service
At DCL customer service means people first. Your fulfillment provider should feel and act like an extension of your team. Your business needs are constantly changing and your fulfillment partner should be able to adapt quickly to meet these needs. It can make or break your business.
At DCL, we pride ourselves on customer service. While technology and operational expertise are critical, high quality service is the glue that keeps things together.
First, we have an industry leading customer-to-account manager ratio of 4-to-1. Our account managers are onsite to ensure we stay as close to our customers’ products as possible in order to help solve issues in real-time. They become their client’s advocates, striving to get the best service possible. Second, we have dedicated order administrators in each warehouse who ensure orders are properly executed. They are an extension of the client service team and keep things humming.
Technology
Being able to connect with multiple supply chain and commerce platforms is a requirement these days to stay relevant. If your 3PL is unable to support and maintain these connections, it can have a devastating impact on your business. Imagine if your 3PL’s systems went down on Black Friday, or were unable to properly connect with your biggest retail partner.
DCL understands that it’s critical to meet and exceed our customers’ requirements as it relates to technology. We have investigated heavily in an in-house development team to on-board new customers and maintain existing integrations. This ranges from connecting to their shopping platform to their ERP.
In addition, we understand having access to real-time and actionable data is critical to managing a successful business, so we built a proprietary order and inventory management platform, eFactory, for our customers. eFactory enables DCL Logistics’ customers to manage and monitor their entire order fulfillment and inventory process in one place. It provides them with real-time insights into their operational KPIs and performance at DCL Logistics’ fulfillment locations.
Scale
Whether your ecommerce growth is rapidly growing, or you’re ramping up your retail sales channels, at DCL we understand that a 3PL needs to ebb and flow with your business. It’s not uncommon for a 3PL partner to operate flawlessly out of the gate, but many run into major issues during the holidays when order volumes spike, or when retailers’ shipping requirements (also known as a routing guide) change. We work tirelessly to plan for these not-uncommon stages, and we leverage our operational experience to ensure our clients avoid these issues.
As we’ve built our business with our customers, we have invested heavily in our own infrastructure. We recently opened our 7th and largest facility in Louisville, Kentucky. We own and operate all seven US facilities, which not only gives us the ability to adapt to our customers’ growth, but ensures that we never stray from the high quality we have maintained at each expansion in our company history.
In addition, we continue to expand our global footprint with integrated fulfillment partners in Canada, Asia, and Europe. These partners have been fully vetted to match the quality standards we maintain, the adoption to technology, and our customer-first work ethic. Our systems are fully integrated so that our customers can manage their entire fulfillment process through a single platform, and one point of contact, backed by an entire team proactively helping scale your global business.
Quality
When DCL was originally founded in 1982, we were a software manufacturing company. We duplicated, labeled, packaged, and shipped millions of diskettes per month for large software companies, including Symantec, Adobe, and Microsoft. Each diskette needed to be identical to the original, which was no easy task. We had to develop a high level of operational expertise, quality control, and discipline to ensure we met the highest quality in order to stay relevant in a cutthroat industry.
This commitment to quality carried over when we shifted our business away from a software manufacturing to fulfillment and logistics. We invested in becoming an ISO certified 3PL in 2000 and have maintained our certification since then. This has allowed us to provide high quality solutions and services to our customers at scale. Check out our in-depth article on the Benefits to working with an ISO certified fulfillment center.
In summary, we’ve built our business methodically over the past three decades and have remained laser focused on meeting our customers needs. We’ve had to adapt and will continue to do so, to adjust to the market and our customers, but we will never waver from our core values. We have built DCL Logistics to be centered around attentive customer service, integrated technology, customer scalability, and rigorous quality standards.
We look forward to helping our customers grow for years to come! If you have any questions or want to learn more about our services, please don’t be shy about reaching out— contact our team here.
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