One of the most exciting aspects of starting a business is daydreaming about how it will one day become a major supplier of its particular products. But as you’re company goes from small to large, you’ll eventually be faced with the tedious process of arriving at the best solutions for your company’s particular shipping needs. If you’re company grows large enough, you may eventually purchase your own shipping fleet and hire fulltime logistics professionals to manage your shipping process. But until then, you have one of two options for achieving the optimal shipping solutions: outsourcing your transportation logistics to a third party logistics (3PL) provider or implementing transport software solutions (i.e. truckload logistics software).

Although contracting with a 3PL provider will help you realize logistical solutions, it will cost you more money and present you with less shipping options than implementing transport software solutions. Because management based 3PL providers make their money by charging companies more than the shipping solutions that they provide actually cost, you essentially end up paying for a middleman to negotiate your logistics solutions. And because management based 3PL providers only work with carrier companies that offer them a rate discount for delivering a steady stream of business, your company has the potential of missing out on the ideal shipping-solutions for its particular needs simply because a 3PL company must put its corporate interest before its clients’ shipping interest.

One of the main reasons that companies continue to contract with 3PL providers is that, because logistics isn’t one of their core competencies, they feel incapable of performing logistics. Nothing could be further from the truth. Whether your company needs local shipping-solutions that transport your products directly to retailers, multi-state shipping solutions that transport unfinished products to multiple assembly locations before transporting them to retailers, or global shipping solutions that combine multiple forms of transportation, the easy to use, customizable interface of logistics software allows management to identify and enact the ideal transportation methods.

If you’re starting your company from scratch, chances are that you want to remain in control of its operations for as long as possible. Logistics software helps you do this, and it gives you the option of using the software as an online application or an internal application, depending on your company’s needs. Regardless of your shipping needs (LTL shipping solutions, TL shipping solutions, Parcel shipping solutions, etc.) one thing is certain: implementing transportation software solutions can have a significant impact on your bottom line. Research shows that companies that implement logistics software can realize a 10 percent decrease in their overall shipping costs after only one year.