3PL Performance Reporting

When your 3PL report says "all good," but your customers disagree

3PL performance reporting is supposed to answer a simple question: how is fulfillment doing. The problem is that many reports answer a different question: how does the 3PL want to look this week. If the report shows a high shipped rate while your customers are still waiting on tracking movement, you are not looking at performance. You are looking at a definition mismatch.

Brands usually discover this after a rough stretch. Support tickets rise. Marketplace metrics dip. Retailers issue chargebacks. The 3PL report arrives on Monday and claims everything is fine. That gap between what the report says and what the business feels is why 3PL performance reporting matters. Good reporting closes the gap by using clear milestones, honest timestamps, and metrics you can act on daily.

What 3PL performance reporting should cover, not just what it often covers

Many 3PL reports over-index on outbound because outbound is visible. In reality, outbound performance is the output of inbound receiving, inventory accuracy, picking and packing flow, carrier handoff, and in B2B, compliance work. If the report does not cover those upstream factors, it will explain very little when things go wrong.

Joel Malmquist, VP of Customer Experience at G10 Fulfillment, described the scope that reporting should follow. "An SLA is a Service Level Agreements for Receiving, Outbound, and B2B." A 3PL performance report should be structured around that same scope, because it is the structure that determines whether orders can be shipped on time, whether inventory is available on time, and whether retailer requirements are met on time.

Why definitions are the first deliverable in any reporting program

Before you argue about percentages, you need to agree on words. Shipped is the most dangerous word in 3PL reporting because it can mean several different things. For some warehouses, it means the label printed. For others, it means the order was completed and staged. For customers, it means the carrier accepted the package and tracking moves. For retailers, it often means compliant, routed, and documented on time.

Malmquist explained the exact problem with using shipped loosely. "The reason I don't say ship is because sometimes it will be marked as completed, but the carrier doesn't actually pick it up right away, but the tracking goes back to Shopify." A good report separates warehouse completion from carrier acceptance, then measures both. It also reports the gap between them, because that gap is a real driver of customer experience and marketplace performance. Without that separation, your 3PL report can claim success while your customers see delay.

Receiving metrics: the upstream portion of the report that prevents downstream surprises

Receiving metrics should be treated as leading indicators. If inbound inventory is slow to be counted and stowed, outbound orders can be late even when the warehouse is working hard. This is how a brand ends up with product in the building and still runs out of sellable inventory in the system.

Malmquist described receiving SLAs in clock-based terms that should appear in every 3PL report. "For receiving, the SLA is covers the time from the moment that we get a container on the dock with inventory in it, and how much time we have to count that in, and stow it away into the locations that we're going to pick from." A strong report therefore shows age on dock, count completion time, stow completion time, and exceptions. Without that view, the report will always be surprised by outbound misses that were predictable days earlier.

Outbound metrics: on-time, cycle time, and what is stuck right now

Outbound reporting should include on-time performance, but it should not stop there. On-time is a result. Cycle time and stage aging explain the result. If your report only gives a weekly on-time percentage, it is like checking a thermometer after the fever is gone. You need visibility into what is aging and where.

In D2C, cutoffs define what on time means. Malmquist described a common commitment in plain language. "For D2C, which is an order through Shopify or on the merchant's website, if it's before noon, we're going to ship that order the same day." A 3PL report should show cutoff-qualified orders, completion by cutoff, carrier acceptance by pickup, and exception reasons for misses. When those details are present, you can fix the constraint that caused the miss instead of blaming volume in general.

Cycle time reporting: the engine room view, not just the scoreboard

Cycle time reporting breaks the order journey into segments: release to pick start, pick duration, pack duration, staging duration, and handoff. This is where you find the true bottleneck. If pick time grows, you look at slotting and replenishment. If pack time grows, you look at station capacity and verification steps. If staging time grows, you look at dock flow and pickup schedules.

Connor Perkins, Director of Fulfillment at G10 Fulfillment, described the frustration brands feel when cycle time is out of control. "I hear nowadays a lot of people want to offer you know same-day fulfillment for customers who place orders before specific times, which is something we do. But then I hear a customer say, 'A previous 3PL took three days from when the order was placed to when they would ship it.'" A good report makes that drift visible by stage, which is how you keep same-day from turning into a daily argument.

Accuracy reporting: speed without correctness is just expensive motion

3PL performance reporting that focuses only on speed creates fast mistakes. Accuracy needs to be visible alongside speed because wrong shipments create reships, returns, and inventory drift that hit margin and customer confidence. Accuracy should be measured at order, line, and unit levels, because each view reveals different issues.

Malmquist described the accuracy level that surprised him when he joined G10. "We have over 99.9% ship accuracy of these orders, which when you look at it on a unit level, such as unit shift versus unit errors, I almost couldn't believe it when I came here, how well we're doing on B2B shipping." Reporting should not treat that as a brag. It should treat it as a reminder that accuracy is measurable and that accuracy data should drive root cause work when errors occur.

Carrier handoff reporting: where "completed" can still mean "not moving"

Carrier handoff is where many 3PL reports get vague. They report completion as if it equals carrier possession. Customers do not experience completion. They experience acceptance and movement. If a package sits staged overnight, your 3PL report can claim the order was shipped while your customer sees a silent tracking page.

Malmquist explained why this happens. "The reason I don't say ship is because sometimes it will be marked as completed, but the carrier doesn't actually pick it up right away, but the tracking goes back to Shopify." A strong 3PL report includes carrier acceptance timestamp, pickup performance, and the completion to acceptance gap. That gap is often where missed pickups, dock congestion, and staging discipline problems hide. It is also the gap that makes customer experience feel worse than your internal metrics suggest.

B2B reporting: compliance milestones are performance milestones

If you ship to retailers, 3PL performance reporting must include compliance milestones. Retailers enforce routing guides, label placement, and EDI timelines, and they penalize noncompliance. A report that ignores compliance can claim success while the retailer issues chargebacks that erase your margin.

Bryan Wright, CTO and COO of G10 Fulfillment, described why B2B needs a different reporting foundation. "Our WMS system was written from day one around B2B, which is very different." He described the requirements that reporting should track. "They have routing guides that make you specific labels on and put them in a specific place on the box, and you have to send EDI, ASN, electronic information in a timely fashion." A 3PL report should therefore show label pass rates, ASN timeliness, routing guide compliance, and exception reasons for failures, because those metrics are what prevent chargebacks.

Why strict retailer deadlines make reporting feel like revenue insurance

Retail deadlines are not suggestions. Holly Woods, Director of Operations at G10 Fulfillment, described the reality brands face with major retailers. "Target has a deadline for delivery and that's it, no exceptions. They'll just cancel the order." That means a late or noncompliant shipment is not only a service issue. It is a revenue loss issue. Reporting should highlight retailer shipments at risk early, including the milestones that determine whether the PO is truly on track.

Woods also described how compressed the timeline can be when inbound arrives late. "When it came in, it had to be completed, received, shipped, labeled, ready for routing to a carrier by that next morning." A 3PL report that surfaces these compressed cases helps brands and operations teams prioritize correctly. Without it, you learn about the issue when the order is already canceled.

Why scan-based tracking keeps reporting honest and actionable

Reporting breaks down when the data is fuzzy. Scan-based events create the clean timestamps needed to reconstruct what happened and to prevent repeats. Manual updates create drift, and drift creates arguments.

Wright described the foundation of trustworthy warehouse data. "A good WMS tracks inventory through the warehouse at every point that you touch it." He explained what that traceability can look like on the floor. "At any point in time, I know that Bobby has this product on fork 10 right now, and if I needed to go find that product, I just got to go find Bobby on fork 10." When your report is built from scan events, you can drill from a KPI to the transaction trail quickly, which is how reporting becomes a tool for improvement instead of a document for debate.

Why real-time visibility changes the value of a 3PL report

Weekly reports are useful for review. They are not useful for prevention. Real-time visibility is what keeps problems from becoming breaches. Maureen Milligan, Director of Operations and Projects at G10 Fulfillment, described what customer-facing portals provide. "What these real-time portals provide our customers is 100% visibility." She added what that means day to day. "They can actually watch those progressions going on." Connor Perkins described the scope of that access. "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." When you can see progress and aging in real time, the report is no longer your only source of truth. It becomes a summary of a reality you already understand.

Where G10 fits if you want 3PL reporting that helps you run the day

3PL performance reporting should make fulfillment predictable by connecting SLAs to real milestones across receiving, outbound, carrier handoff, and B2B compliance. G10 focuses on scan-based execution and customer-facing visibility built on ChannelPoint WMS, so performance is measurable, drillable, and shared. As Malmquist said, "An SLA is a Service Level Agreements for Receiving, Outbound, and B2B." That scope guides what gets reported and what gets improved.

If you want to see whether a 3PL report is truly useful, ask for a walkthrough of a live day in the portal, including one exception case. You should be able to start with an SLA metric, drill into the underlying transactions, and see exactly where the delay or risk lives, so you can grow without letting fulfillment surprises become your default.