The rate at which technology has developed over the last ten, thirty, fifty years has been nothing short of astounding. Much has happened since the days when a 9-inch color television was enough to invite over the whole neighborhood. The days when phonelines were our only means of home or business connectivity. The days when even the most basic personal computer was a behemoth, requiring two or three grown men to offload it from a truck into a home or office.

These days, technology has come so far along that the computers may soon be the ones unloading the trucks. And in fact, the industry has already witnessed road tests of self-driving cargo trucks hauling freight across the country. And while this sort of wide-eyed futuristic technology often seem to be perpetually relegated to a testing phase, we are absolutely seeing Jetsons-esque technology begin to slip into reality. And more importantly, we're seeing subtle, effective technologies that not even works of fiction could have predicted.

^{Computer from the 1950’s, Bendix G-15}                               

When opportunity blooms, a shipper can go down one of several roads in choosing how to approach supply chain management. Some may choose to start from a lowly square one, tallying up the many costs, capital requirements, and risks ahead of their undertaking, and laboriously stacking all of those burdens on top of their initial business operation. But what if that shipper could hit the ground running? With a tried and true expert ally prepared to take on all of those secondary yet crucial aspects of the shipper’s operation, how much more quickly and effectively could that shipper penetrate the market? Outsourcing the order fulfillment process to a third party logistics provider, or 3PL, has some critical advantages. Here are some ways in which these efficiencies come to light.