3PL IT Support

You started with one customer in a 30,000 square foot building off the 60. Now you've got eleven customers across two warehouses, and the conversation with your largest one — the one with the Walmart vendor program — is the one that keeps you up at night. They want EDI integration, they want a customer portal, they want billing transparency, they want a SOC report by Q3, and they don't really care that your IT was set up by your brother-in-law in 2017. Your operations are growing into the kind of customer that has compliance requirements, and your infrastructure has to keep up.

The Systems That Run Your Operation

A 3PL stack is a warehousing stack with extra layers. The WMS has to be multi-tenant capable, or you're running parallel instances per client. Most of our 3PL clients run on a tiered WMS like 3PL Central / Extensiv, Körber 3PL, Synapse, or a customized SAP EWM deployment. A few run NetSuite WMS with custom roles per customer.

EDI is the connective tissue. Each customer wants their own subset of X12 transactions, sometimes with their own EDI VAN, sometimes through a partner like SPS Commerce or TrueCommerce, sometimes direct AS2. The 856 ASN to Walmart looks different from the 856 to Target, which looks different again from the 940 inbound shipping order from Costco. Multiply by a dozen customers and you've got dozens of map files to maintain.

Customer portals matter. Whether you've built one on top of your WMS API or you're using the WMS vendor's built-in portal, your customers expect to log in, see their inventory, see their shipment status, and pull their own billing reports.

Billing is its own system. Per-pallet, per-touch, per-shipment, per-storage-day. Sometimes the WMS calculates it, sometimes a separate billing engine does, sometimes it's a spreadsheet built in 2019 that nobody dares touch.

Where Things Break

The EDI feed fails silently. Your customer's compliance portal updates at midnight, you don't check it until Tuesday morning, and there are seventeen ASN failures from Friday night that the integration didn't surface as alerts. The chargeback letter from the vendor compliance team is already in the mail.

Data segregation lapses. A new staff member is set up with a WMS role copied from someone else, and that role has read access to two customers it shouldn't see. Your largest customer's compliance audit pulls a user permissions report. Now you're explaining.

Onboarding a new customer takes too long. The customer has signed and they want to start receiving inbound in three weeks. You need EDI maps, custom labels, billing rules, portal access, integration with their TMS, and a kickoff with their compliance team. Without a documented onboarding playbook, every new customer is another three-week scramble.

Ransomware is the existential risk. A 3PL serving fifteen customers can't operate for a week while a WMS host is restored. The customers aren't waiting. They'll start moving inventory out of your building, and once it's out, it's hard to get back.

How We Approach It

We treat customer onboarding like a deployment. A playbook in Hudu lists every IT artifact required: WMS tenant config, EDI maps, label specs, billing rules, portal access, VPN if requested, and the security review questionnaire they'll send you. When a new customer is in flight, we work the checklist with your operations lead so nothing gets missed in the rush.

We monitor EDI like infrastructure. Failed transactions alert into our PSA, not to an inbox nobody reads. We can see ASN volumes per customer per day, and when one drops to zero we know about it before the customer's vendor compliance team does.

We get serious about backup and recovery, because the threat model demands it. NinjaOne handles the backup, and we replicate to our Proxmox private cloud in Burbank with offsite replication to Dallas. The point isn't the backup itself. The point is the documented, rehearsed recovery so you can tell a customer's compliance officer exactly what the RTO is on their data.

We harden Microsoft 365 and your WMS access controls. MFA everywhere. Conditional access policies that block sign-ins from countries you don't operate in. Role-based access in the WMS reviewed quarterly. Endpoint detection on every machine that touches customer data.

When you're sitting in a customer's procurement meeting and they ask about your IT posture, you want to be able to hand over a one-page summary, not improvise.

Talk to Us

If you're growing into customers with real compliance requirements, or you've had EDI failures bite you in the last few quarters, or you just want a second set of eyes on how your customer data is segregated across your WMS roles, get in touch. We'll walk through your stack and tell you what we'd actually do.