Eric Rempel, chief innovation officer at Redwood Logistics, says the modern fourth-party logistics provider offers a finely honed logistics platform as a service.

Rempel acknowledges that some people might not see a difference between a third-party and fourth-party logistics provider, but that’s only because they don’t understand how the latter orchestrates supply chains. “It could be that they just haven't found the business value for it yet,” he says. “You look at a 3PL to execute on your behalf; you look for a 4PL to help with strategy and orchestration on your behalf. Perhaps those organizations aren't at a point where they're ready to evolve to that level of supply chain management. But whether you call it a 4PL or you call it an orchestrated supply chain or anything in between, the demand for it is certainly there.”

A modern 4PL has an integration platform as a service at its heart, and can execute on the digital side to orchestrate supply chain technology, he says. When those two things are put together, that enables picking technologies and partners. All customers should be able to optimize the way they do things in their supply chain. “That, to us, is a modern 4PL. That's a logistics platform as a service.”

Every organization has its own supply chain fingerprint, Rempel says, meaning it employs its own systems and has unique pains accessing and using data. Most companies can utilize a 4PL and drive automated business decisions in under a month, he says.

Asked about the benefits of utilizing a 4PL, Rempel replies, “What can't an organization do if it has its data under control? So if you have good data and that data is now being cleaned by a platform and sent to the right places in real time, now you can actually measure.”