The 2016 3PL CEO Survey: Threats, Disruptions, and Opportunities

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the March-April 2017 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

March-April 2017

Supply Chain Management Review, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary with this issue.Twenty years after the premier issue, our goal remains the same: To present thought leadership around best practices in supply chain fundamentals, publish case study examples of what leading companies are doing in their supply chains and keep our finger on the pulse of emerging trends and technologies that will shape the future. While Frank’s essay looks to the past and brings us to the present, we also have essays from four experienced supply chain professionals looking to the future of supply chain management.

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Threats, disruptions and opportunities. This might sound slightly counter-intuitive, but it is an accurate description of the results of the 2016 survey of the CEOs of 14 of the largest third-party logistics (3PL) companies serving the North American marketplace, representing $19.8 billion in North American 3PL revenues during 2015.

This is the 23rd iteration of this annual study, and this year, we are taking a little different tack. Along with surveying CEOs on economic topics, which we will publish separately on scmr.com, we also looked into the dynamics driving changes in the marketplace; the threats they may present to the 3PL industry as well as the opportunities they present to those 3PLs that can turn potential disruptions into a competitive advantage. Those topics included recent shipper reactions to the 2014-2015 labor problems at West Coast ports, changes in the e-commerce marketplace and their impact on 3PLs, Amazon’s continued expansion into logistics services, major technology changes affecting the 3PL industry and the growing use of data analytics by 3PLs.

E-commerce marketplace dynamics

E-commerce is an increasingly important revenue source for the 3PLs that participated in our 2016 survey, accounting for an average of 14.04% of their North American revenue base in 2015. That business grew by an average of 18.46% during that year. Given the growth potential of that market, these companies have substantially increased their resource commitments to developing and servicing e-commerce accounts.

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