Our expertise in 3PL and indeed Supply Chain is quite formidable now, we have five staff in the business now capable of doing sophisticated SC financial models (which we call “Cost to serve’ they can be complex and involve international and/or domestic freight, funding costs, stock turns, labour facility etc…)
An associate of mine runs the UK office for a company called Cargowise, Cargowise are an AU based company, they literally own the freight forwarding and WMS application market in NZ and AU, and they are now the top tier provider of 3PL WMS software in Europe and USA in their class (I understand is enterprise level). I was speaking to Mark the other day, they have been trying to get us to switch from Colosys to their WMS brand for many years (which we wont because we love Colosys) but they have been trying to get us to resell and support Cargowise for some time, in his words SCS is one of the most advanced 3PL’s he has met anywhere in the world (and he reckons he has dealt with most major players across the globe) and he rates our capability as being one of the top three people he knows globally in the 3PL space. He has always been encouraging me to develop professional services capability, so last year we finally did. In fact he recently offered me a full time job consulting in Europe and the US for ridiculous money which I graciously declined.
The division is still in it’s infancy, its an interesting area for us and one where can finally make good margin (3pl is ridiculously difficult to make money in, we estimate 5 out of 200 providers in AKL actually put black ink on their books at the end of each financial year) I’ve been surprised (and pleased) to learn I can charge 400.00 per hour for my time in certain areas and we now charge out our project management and IT services against a professional fees structure. As a legacy SCS client you will still receive our services for free most of the time (one of the key reasons you chose us!) or a materially discounted rate if conversations develop into projects but I think its good to let you know that our capability is so good in this area that we now charge for them. That said we picked up two projects last year and we are now at capacity until April! Copy of our fees schedule FYI. Shows you more of our capability nowadays which will pleasantly surprise some of the legacy clients to learn about.
