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1. Value-added Warehousing Providers

These are 3PLs that manage all or part of customers' logistics operations and provide physical assets and labor resources for warehousing services.

2. Asset-based Transportation Providers

These 3PLs act as service integrators and have there own fleet and assets to provide services to clients.

3. Air/Ocean Freight Forwarders

These 3PL providers handle both ocean and air transportation and are familiar with all rules or regulations.

4. IT Support Providers

These 3PLs provide required IT infrastructure both hardware and software. The services that are required are web-based solution, EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), etc.

This way the supply chain would be a series of 3PL providers. The important question now is what would be the kind of relationship between the parties. To answer that, let's first define a framework for the same. This framework depends on 2 dimensions: timeframe and depth.

Figure 2. 3PL Relationship Framework

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* Contributed by: -
Praneet Parate & Anusha Jain,
IIM Lucknow.