Real Time Fulfillment Updates: Keeping Every Order On Your Radar

Fulfillment feels risky when updates fall behind the work

Fulfillment is stressful even when everything is going well. Orders flow in, staff move fast, carriers arrive and depart, and inventory shifts constantly. The stress becomes real trouble when your information lags behind your operation. If your system does not deliver real time fulfillment updates, you are always one step behind your own business. Research shows that brands have grown less patient with delayed visibility. They want to see what is happening now, not what happened yesterday.

Without real time updates, every team begins to guess. Customer service guesses whether orders are picked. Operations guesses whether batches are on pace. Leadership guesses whether promises to retailers and end customers can be kept. As guesses replace facts, confidence erodes and decision making slows down.

Many brands who come to G10 have felt this firsthand. They tried to grow on top of a 3PL that could not keep them informed. Their orders stalled without explanation. Their inventory records drifted. Their reports never seemed to match what customers were experiencing. They arrive needing something very specific: real time fulfillment updates that match the reality on the floor.

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." That disillusionment begins when updates stop telling the truth.

Real time fulfillment updates are built on real time tracking

Order updates cannot be real time unless the work they describe is tracked in real time. Every pick, pack, move, and handoff has to hit the system as it occurs. When the warehouse sees its own actions clearly, it can pass that clarity on as accurate, timely updates.

Bryan Wright described this kind of tracking 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." Real time fulfillment updates are simply this history, surfaced as it happens instead of long after the fact.

When an operation runs with this level of visibility, updates are no longer a separate task. They are a natural consequence of good tracking. The system knows what happened, so the system can say what is happening.

Scan-based workflows keep updates honest

Real time fulfillment updates do not come from wishful thinking. They come from scan-based workflows that leave no gaps between the physical and digital worlds. If work can happen without a scan, updates can fall out of sync with reality. If scans are required, updates stay grounded in facts.

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." That same scan-based standard is what keeps fulfillment updates reliable instead of approximate.

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." When accuracy fails, even the fastest update can mislead people. Real time fulfillment updates only help when they reflect precise, scan-backed work.

Portals turn fulfillment updates into a live view of operations

Real time fulfillment updates are most valuable when brands can see them without asking. A modern 3PL should not force its customers to request status checks. Updates should be available on demand inside a portal that reflects the current state of orders, inventory, and shipments.

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." Those live statuses are real time fulfillment updates in their most useful form.

She went further, saying, "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." She then added, "They can actually watch those progressions going on."

Connor described the reporting foundation behind 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 fulfillment updates sit on top of this kind of rich operational data.

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 updates do not only appear on a screen. They can be pulled into the rest of the business.

Real time fulfillment updates keep small issues from turning into big failures

Most fulfillment crises are preventable if someone sees the warning signs early enough. A batch begins to run behind. A carrier changes its pickup time. A spike in orders overwhelms a single station. If nobody sees these shifts until the end of the day, recovery is hard and expensive. Real time fulfillment updates surface trouble while there is still time to respond.

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." Consistency like this depends on seeing the work as it happens, not only after it is over.

Real time fulfillment updates let leaders reassign labor, re-balance workloads, and communicate proactively before customers notice a problem. They turn uncertainty into a series of manageable decisions.

Fulfillment updates rebuild trust after bad 3PL experiences

Brands that have been let down by a previous provider often arrive with low expectations. They remember being told that everything was fine while orders slipped and customers waited. They remember dashboards that always seemed slightly out of sync with reality. Real time fulfillment updates give them something different: continuous, visible proof.

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." That trust grows faster when updates are frequent, accurate, and easy to access.

Real time fulfillment updates are now the basic expectation

Fast-moving brands cannot afford to operate on stale information. They need to know, in real time, whether their 3PL is keeping pace with demand. They need to see orders move from received to picked to packed to shipped without waiting for a weekly review. Real time fulfillment updates deliver that visibility.

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 fulfillment updates are a core part of that transparency.

If you want fulfillment that communicates as quickly as it moves, real time fulfillment updates provide the steady stream of truth your teams and customers need. Instead of chasing answers, you can watch the work happen and act with confidence.