3PL Dashboard: Making Your Fulfillment Performance Impossible To Ignore

When your 3PL is a black box, decisions turn into guesses

Outsourcing fulfillment is supposed to make life easier. But when your 3PL runs everything on the inside and you cannot see what is happening on the outside, it can feel more like giving up control than gaining help. If you do not have a clear 3PL dashboard that shows how orders, inventory, and service levels are performing in real time, you are left to make calls based on partial information. Research shows that brands now expect live visibility into their operations, not just a PDF after the fact.

Without a 3PL dashboard, every question becomes a small project. Customer service has to ask for updates on delayed orders. Finance has to request reports before building forecasts. Operations leaders have to email or call to find out whether the warehouse is keeping pace with demand. The more your volume grows, the more painful this becomes.

Many brands who come to G10 have felt this gap. Their previous provider told them performance was fine, but they did not have the tools to confirm it. They would hear about problems only after customers were already upset. They would learn about inventory issues only when orders went short. They arrive at G10 looking for a different kind of relationship, one built around a 3PL dashboard that gives them real visibility, all the time.

As Maureen Milligan said, "Most of the customers who come to us from another 3PL, their challenges have always been access to their data, order accuracy and efficiency, and basically just meeting the committed requirements. So we've seen a lot of people come disillusioned by their last 3PL, where their orders weren't getting fulfilled in time, their inventory accuracy was not there, and they were not able to satisfy customer orders." A strong 3PL dashboard is one way to show, not just say, that those challenges are being addressed.

A 3PL dashboard starts with detailed, real time tracking

A dashboard is only as useful as the data behind it. If a 3PL is not tracking events in real time, then their dashboard is just a collection of stale numbers. For a 3PL dashboard to have value, it has to be driven by a live record of what is actually happening to product and orders.

Bryan Wright described how G10 captures that record when he said, "Absolutely. We have portals that show you the data. We have history that shows you all of that tracking. It shows the product landed on the dock at 8 o'clock. At 8:10, John picked it up and took it to location XYZ, and at 10 o'clock, we picked two items off of that pellet in the location 1, 2, 3, 4, order, you know, ABC, and at 11 o'clock, we packed it, we put it in this box and put this label number on it, and all the way through the process onto the truck and to the customer." That kind of history is what allows a 3PL dashboard to move beyond surface metrics.

With this level of data, a 3PL dashboard can answer the questions that matter. How many orders are in each status right now. Which service level commitments are at risk. How many inbounds have been received against plan. How much inventory is on hand and where it sits. Without that live tracking, the dashboard may look nice but will not help you run the business.

Scan-based workflows keep 3PL dashboard data trustworthy

No dashboard can be trusted if the activities on the floor are not captured accurately. When workers move freight or pick orders without scanning, the gap between what the screen shows and what is happening grows wider every hour. A 3PL dashboard built on inconsistent processes will only give a polished view of bad information.

As Connor Perkins said, "You want everything to be scanned in the warehouse, nothing done on paper. You can lose a lot of money in this industry by you know having people ship stuff wrong, or store it wrong, and now it's lost somewhere. So having a 3PL and WMS that is 100% scan-based is crucial." A 3PL dashboard built on that standard can be treated as a source of truth instead of a suggestion.

Connor also highlighted the cost of weak accuracy when he said, "One of the pain points our clients have experienced with previous 3PLSs is inventory accuracy; maybe their previous 3PL wasn't great at picking the orders accurately. So they were losing money by shipping wrong items or wrong quantities of items." A good 3PL dashboard helps expose those issues, but it can only do that if the underlying processes are scan based and disciplined.

A 3PL dashboard should live in a portal you can use any time

If the only time you see performance data is during a quarterly review, you do not really have a 3PL dashboard. You have a slideshow. A true 3PL dashboard lives in a portal where you and your team can check on operations whenever you need to, without having to ask for a custom report.

As Maureen said, "We're in the last stages of developing a new portal that will give customers real-time visibility to their on-time order fulfillment, inventory accuracy, and even inventory levels so that they can monitor those things directly in our systems. They'll have visibility to what the statuses of their orders-are they getting processed as they expect?-and things like that." That is the essence of a useful 3PL dashboard: direct, immediate visibility into what matters.

She also said, "A lot of the 3PL customer expectations are that order fulfillment is happening extremely timely, that our inventory is accurate, that we're able to execute on their orders very quickly, and get them shipped the same day. So what these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility. A client might say, 'I had 100 orders come into the system before noon, we're going to fulfill and ship those out today.' And they now have direct visibility to watch that progression throughout the stages of the fulfillment process. They can then make sure that their orders are fulfilled and out the door without having to wait till we send them back a notification that the order is fulfilled." A 3PL dashboard is one of the main ways that progression shows up on screen.

Connor explained the backbone behind this visibility when he said, "Our clients get best-in-class visibility and transparency. They can see their daily orders, they can see KPIs, and they can see historical transactions. They can look at a daily level or go into the more granular version where they're looking at transactional history on an item." A strong 3PL dashboard should make it easy to move between those levels.

He also said, "You have easy access to reporting and you can export to Excel, or really any format that you like you know directly from our WMS portal." That means the dashboard is not the end of the data story. It is the starting point.

A 3PL dashboard turns early warning signs into timely action

In a growing operation, very few problems arrive without warning. There are usually early hints. Unpicked orders start to pile up in a certain channel. A pack lane falls behind. A wave misses its target. Without a good 3PL dashboard, these signals stay buried in the noise until someone feels the pain.

With the right dashboard view, those signals become obvious. Leaders can see the backlog forming as it forms. They can see when capacity is falling behind demand. They can intervene before service levels are broken instead of after. The dashboard becomes more than a scoreboard. It becomes a control panel.

As Maureen said, "We will take in your inbounds, we will get them received and reported back to you within our SLAs, and oftentimes more quickly than what we contracted for. We will ship your orders out the day they're required. And our inventory accuracy is generally right there at that 99.7% that we agreed. So that's one of the areas where we really do excel, and where we've been able to win business." A 3PL dashboard that exposes this kind of performance gives brands confidence that these results are real, not just words.

Dashboards help repair trust after bad 3PL relationships

Brands rarely leave a 3PL after a single bad day. They leave after months or years of feeling like they do not know what is really happening. They remember being under-informed and over-exposed. They remember hearing that everything was fine while customers and retailers were saying the opposite. A 3PL dashboard that shows live data is one of the clearest ways to break that pattern.

As Maureen said, "For customers who have come to us from a bad 3PL relationship, they experience relief. They're suddenly seeing their business scaling, that the data supports what we agreed to, and then the trust begins to build." A 3PL dashboard that consistently matches what brands see in their own customer feedback makes that trust much easier to rebuild.

The 3PL dashboard is now part of the basic expectation

For serious brands, a 3PL dashboard is no longer a deluxe feature. It is part of the basic expectation when they evaluate partners. They want to know how they will see their orders, their inventory, their performance, and their exceptions. They want to know how quickly they will know if something starts to slip.

As Connor said, "This is one of our strengths. G10 is on the cutting edge for this kind of transparency and feedback for clients." A well-built 3PL dashboard is a visible example of that transparency.

If you are ready to stop wondering whether your 3PL is keeping pace and start seeing the proof, a 3PL dashboard built on real time tracking, scan-based workflows, and flexible reporting is the next step. It takes your relationship from "trust us" to "see for yourself," and that shift can change how you plan, how you respond, and how confidently you grow.