Real Time 3PL Visibility: Seeing Every Move Your Supply Chain Makes

When your 3PL goes quiet, your whole business feels it

Most brands do not fear delays as much as they fear uncertainty. A delay can be explained. Silence cannot. When a 3PL cannot show what is happening in real time, leaders are forced to make decisions without visibility. Research shows that growing brands expect far more than periodic updates. They want to see fulfillment happen as it happens. They want real time 3PL visibility.

When visibility lags, every team feels it. Customer service starts guessing. Finance questions forecasts. Operations wonders whether the warehouse is keeping pace. This breakdown does not come from a single failure. It comes from missing information at the exact moment you need it.

Many brands reach this point after working with a provider that did not offer the transparency they expected. They were told orders were moving, but the data did not support it. They were told inventory was accurate, but counts kept drifting. They were told performance was strong, but customers complained. They come to G10 looking for a 3PL that shows its work, not one that conceals it behind outdated systems.

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." Real time 3PL visibility exists to prevent these failures.

Real time 3PL visibility means tracking every action, not just the final outcome

True visibility does not begin at the carrier scan. It begins the moment product enters the building. A 3PL must show how inventory moves, who touches it, where it goes, and how quickly it transitions from one stage to the next. Real time 3PL visibility is a full timeline, not a single timestamp.

Bryan Wright described what this should look 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."

This is the core of real time 3PL visibility. It replaces assumptions with timestamps. It turns operations into a story you can follow instead of a mystery you must interpret.

Scanning and discipline are the foundation of real time visibility

No 3PL can claim real time visibility unless it captures actions the moment they happen. That means every product movement must be scanned. Every pick, pack, receive, and replenish event must hit the system immediately. Real time visibility is impossible when data is delayed.

Connor Perkins put the emphasis in the right place when he 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." Real time 3PL visibility depends on this discipline. Without it, the data is incomplete. With it, the data becomes a source of truth.

Connor also described what happens when accuracy fails. 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." Visibility does not fix errors, but it exposes them early, before they become costly.

Portals turn real time visibility into something customers can use

Collecting visibility is not enough. A 3PL must share it. Real time visibility belongs in a customer-facing portal where brands can monitor operations without waiting on support tickets or scheduled calls. When a brand can see what the 3PL sees, the relationship becomes stronger and smoother.

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." This is what customers expect when they ask for real time visibility.

She continued, "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." Visibility is not a luxury. It is a requirement.

Connor reinforced this 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." Real time 3PL visibility is not just about seeing the present. It is about understanding the past and predicting the future.

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." Visibility becomes powerful when customers can take the data with them.

Real time visibility prevents small issues from becoming large failures

In fulfillment, problems rarely appear suddenly. They grow quietly. A pick line falls behind. A receiving team gets overloaded. A carrier arrives early. Without real time visibility, none of these issues come to light until it is too late to fix them. With real time visibility, they surface immediately.

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." Consistent results like this require consistent visibility.

Real time 3PL visibility gives operations the chance to correct course before customers ever notice friction. It keeps performance predictable, stable, and measurable. Small issues stay small because they cannot hide.

Visibility builds trust faster than promises

A 3PL earns trust when it shows the truth, not when it declares confidence. Real time visibility makes performance undeniable. Customers do not have to wonder whether orders shipped on time or whether inventory is accurate. They can see it.

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." Transparency makes this possible.

Real time 3PL visibility is no longer optional for serious brands

Modern fulfillment moves too quickly for outdated reporting. Brands that scale need clarity that updates with every scan. They need to know where their products are, what their orders are doing, and how their 3PL is performing. Anything less creates risk.

As Connor said, "This is one of our strengths. G10 is on the cutting edge for this kind of transparency and feedback for clients." Real time 3PL visibility is the expectation now, not an upgrade.

If you want a supply chain that is as transparent as it is fast, real time 3PL visibility is the foundation. It turns confusion into clarity and turns your 3PL into a partner you can trust in the moments that matter.