When finding the best 3PL for health and wellness brands, you must consider some key factors carefully. These include analyzing their experience, meeting quality standards, tracking expiration products, using advanced technology, and more.
In this guide, we will discuss the key aspects you need to check before hiring a health and wellness fulfillment partner in detail.
How To Find The Best 3PL For Health And Wellness Brands
1. Experience In The Health And Wellness Industry
Before hiring a health and wellness fulfillment partner, you need to identify whether they have experience working in the industry. Moreover, they should have handled previous clients in this niche and gained expertise.
Based on that, you can ask questions and check their knowledge and experience under the below requirements:
- Experience handling sensitive products such as vitamins, supplements, or other goods.
- Ensuring compliance with FDA guidelines.
- How well does the provider ensure compliance with GMP (Good Manufacturing Practices)?
- Techniques in managing inventory levels and expiration date tracking.
- Adaptability to key industry trends such as DTC(direct-to-customer) subscription management and retail fulfillment.
- The methods used to measure work efficiency and customer experience.
2. Expiration Date Track
Regular reports can help you analyze how well expiration date tracking is handled. Since you deal with health and wellness products, keeping track is essential.
The 3PL should sell the goods with shorter expiration dates faster to reduce wastage or less. Also, an effective product rotation strategy is key to avoiding loss, stockouts, and errors and keeping the correct stock levels.
3. Value-Added Services (VAS)
If your 3PL provider provides value-added services (VAS), it helps you to enhance customer experience satisfaction and even increase sales. In a health and wellness business, there are different aspects to which you can provide VAS. They include:
- Adding marketing materials and inserts
- Branded packaging
- Bundling products
- Exclusive offers for other products
- Informational inserts on product benefits
- Kitting
- Loyalty rewards
- Re-packaging
You can implement VAS to create a unique brand experience depending on your business. For example, you can package different product flavors or new items. This helps customers increase their willingness to try new products during product launches.
Therefore, depending on your business, you can ask which type of VAS they provide and their experienced techniques.
4. Providing Reporting And Insights
When handling health and wellness goods, it is important to obtain regular reports and insights from the 3PL provider. This helps you assess the effectiveness of business activities and identify ways to optimize them.
For example, based on reporting, you can analyze the real-time tracking of fulfillment metrics such as order accuracy, order fulfillment, shipping times, top-selling items, demands, orders per channel, and more. Therefore, these metrics give you insight into what you are performing poorly and what you need to improve.
5. Regulatory Compliance
The 3PL partner should be knowledgeable about regulatory compliance, such as medical regulations and laws. However, you need to assess their understanding before hiring to ensure they are well aware and avoid inconveniences.
Here are some critical regulatory compliance the 3PL should be mindful of in health and wellness brand handling:
- Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs)
- FDA and USDA Regulations
- Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP)
- Labeling and Packaging Laws
- Temperature and Storage Controls
6. Scalability And Flexibility
Your potential 3PL must support scalability. Depending on your business and customer demands, the 3PL should be able to scale up or down the business operations.
For example, if the customer expects fast delivery, the 3PL should be flexible and formulate strategies to minimize the delivery time. Even if you are willing to do bundle packaging during a seasonal time, your 3PL should help you implement the plan.
Therefore, your potential 3PL plays a key role in helping you run your business operations smoothly.
7. Advanced Technology
The 3PL provider should use advanced technologies to enhance overall business efficiency. Also, it ensures fast and accurate 3PL operations. Here are some key advanced technologies 3PLs use in health and wellness brands:
- Warehouse Management Systems (WMS)
- Cold Chain Monitoring Systems
- Automated Storage and Retrieval Systems (ASRS)
- Transportation Management Systems (TMS)
- Internet of Things (IoT) (helps with real-time tracking)
- Robotics and Automation (aids for order fulfillment)
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) (helps with demand forecasting)
- Blockchain (ensures supply chain transparency)
- Data Analytics (supports performance optimization)
8. Seamless Integrations And Onboarding
When you partner with a 3PL provider, they must use advanced technology to help you seamlessly integrate with your systems. Also, during onboarding, a smooth approach should be used to combine with your system, optimize warehouse processes, and frequently give you insights into business operations.
If they have pre-built integrations, they can support quick onboarding, reduce implementation costs, ensure real-time data flow, and reduce operational costs.
9. Data Security
Has the 3PL taken ideal data security measures? It’s essential to ensure data security, maintain tight regulations to avoid data sharing, ensure confidentiality, and use encryption technology to protect data privacy.
Attention to data security is essential, especially for health and wellness brands.
10. Controlled Storage Facilities
Healthcare products should be stored in properly temperature-controlled environments. Therefore, the 3PL should take of it and manage various aspects of the warehouse, such as temperature, humidity, and light. Keeping these factors at the ideal level helps to ensure that the quality and nature of the product are preserved.
11. Quality Assurance
The 3PL partner should carefully observe the key quality assurance principles of health and wellness products. You should have outlined a set of checklists and policies to check whether the products meet the expected standards beforehand.
The products can be warehoused and shipped if they meet the expected standards. If not, ideal policies must be implemented to recycle or handle them effectively.
Final Thoughts
In conclusion, choosing the best 3PL for health and wellness brands might be difficult, as you must consider many factors. Moreover, your health and wellness fulfillment partner is key in smoothly handling your business operations.
Do you need help finding the perfect 3PL partner for your health and wellness business? 3PeeL can help you match the ideal partner to your unique requirements.
