3PL Transparency Software: Turning Fulfillment Into Proof, Not Promises

When you cannot see what your 3PL is doing, you cannot manage outcomes

3PL transparency software matters because fulfillment is not a black box job. Research shows that customers expect fast shipping, accurate orders, and clear status updates, and brands get blamed when anything breaks. If you cannot see order status, inventory accuracy, and exception risk in real time, you end up managing the business with delayed reports and support emails. That is not management. That is improvisation.

Many brands come to G10 after dealing with a familiar frustration. They outsourced fulfillment, but they also outsourced visibility. They were told things were fine, right up until orders were late or inventory was wrong. Transparency software is how you get control back, without pulling the operation back in-house.

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." Transparency software addresses that disillusionment by making operational truth accessible every day.

Transparency software has to be real time, or it is just reporting

There is a big difference between reporting and transparency. Reporting tells you what happened. Transparency helps you see what is happening now. Research shows that delays in inventory and order status updates increase oversells, missed cutoffs, and customer-facing surprises because teams make decisions based on stale information.

Maureen described what real time access should look like when she 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." 3PL transparency software should let brands monitor performance directly, not wait for a weekly summary.

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." That is the goal: visibility that is continuous, not occasional.

Scan-based execution is what makes transparency believable

Transparency software cannot be better than the data it receives. Research shows that visibility fails when warehouse events are not captured consistently. Scan-based workflows are the foundation because scanning turns physical work into system truth.

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." Transparency software depends on that scan-based discipline because the system needs accurate, time-stamped events.

Connor also 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." Transparency helps expose accuracy risk quickly, but scanning reduces the number of errors that create that risk.

Order transparency requires a full lifecycle view

Tracking numbers are not transparency. Brands need to see the full order lifecycle: when an order was received, released, picked, packed, labeled, and shipped. Research shows that faster issue resolution happens when teams can pinpoint where an order is stuck.

Bryan Wright described what full lifecycle traceability looks like 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 level of history turns a delayed order from a mystery into a specific, fixable bottleneck.

Inventory transparency must include availability and accuracy

Inventory totals are not enough. Brands need transparency into inventory availability, allocation, and accuracy. Research shows that oversells often happen when systems treat on-hand inventory as available-to-sell across channels.

Transparency software should show not only how many units exist, but what state they are in: available, allocated, picked, packed, shipped, damaged, quarantined, and inbound. That helps brands stop selling inventory that is not actually sellable.

Transaction history is what makes transparency defensible

Transparency software should not just show dashboards. It should allow drilldowns into transaction history so teams can explain changes. When inventory changes, brands need to know why. When a KPI moves, brands need to know what caused it. Research shows that transaction-level visibility reduces repeat errors because teams can fix root causes rather than guessing.

As Connor 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." That ability to drill down is what separates transparency from pretty charts.

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." Export access matters because transparency should support collaboration across finance, operations, and customer support.

Transparency software reduces support tickets by preventing surprises

Research shows that many customer support contacts come from uncertainty. Customers ask, "Where is my order," when updates are unclear or late. Brands also generate internal tickets when inventory status is confusing. Transparency software reduces both by making status, exceptions, and history visible.

When a brand can see exceptions early, it can communicate proactively. When inventory is trending low, it can adjust promotions. When a workflow bottleneck appears, it can address it before it becomes a missed cutoff.

Transparency supports B2B compliance and accountability

For retail compliance, wholesale routing requirements, and HAZMAT handling, transparency is not a luxury. Research shows that compliance failures create chargebacks, rejected shipments, and delays that ripple across the supply chain. Transparency software supports accountability by making fulfillment events traceable and exceptions visible.

When you can prove what happened, conversations get easier. Evidence replaces guesswork, and issues become solvable rather than political.

How G10 approaches 3PL transparency software

G10 was founded in 2009, and we built our ChannelPoint WMS to support B2B and D2C ecommerce, retail, wholesale, and HAZMAT-compliant fulfillment with same-day shipping, custom capabilities, and retailer integration. Transparency is built into the system through scan-based execution, portals, and transaction history.

As Connor said, "This is one of our strengths. G10 is on the cutting edge for this kind of transparency and feedback for clients." Transparency software should give you answers that are immediate, specific, and provable.

If you want to see what transparency looks like when order status, inventory levels, and transaction history are available in real time, ask for a walkthrough of ChannelPoint that maps your current blind spots to a clearer, more defensible visibility model.