This interview is with Landon Pyle, VP of Marketing, Sales & Business Development at R&S Logistics.

Landon Pyle, VP of Marketing, Sales & Business Development, R&S Logistics

For readers meeting you for the first time, what’s your role, where does your 3PL operate, and what kinds of brands and channels do you support?

My name is Landon, and I am the VP of Business Development and Sales at R&S. We operate primarily in the Southeast, but we have customers from all over. We work with a variety from manufacturers and OEM suppliers to e-commerce brands and food and beverage customers. That said, it may be obvious, but we support a lot of different channels. Anything that’s hard to handle or others turn away, we want.

Looking back, what key experiences or turning points led you into 3PL logistics and prepared you to run multi-site fulfillment operations?

Growing up on a farm, I had a background with taking care of other things like animals, equipment, and crops. It’s not that different from a 3PL really. I got into the industry almost 10 years ago, and in that time, we’ve grow to 2 million square feet across about 12 locations. It’s been a lot of fun.

Building on that, as you scaled across multiple warehouses, what was the toughest operational constraint you had to fix, and how did you solve it in practice?

Operating a 3PL is a large expense. Labor, equipment, and the building to name a few can be large expenses and operational bottlenecks. We’ve always been agile, willing to work and grow with our customer. So we’ve often rolled up our sleeves and stepped in to help with a customer when they’ve needed it and we’re down people. We’ve made tight spaces work before, and we’ve also worked long hours to get a job done.

On the systems side, can you walk us through a specific WMS-to-marketplace integration (e.g., Walmart/Etsy/Wayfair via Dropstream)—the timeline, failure points, and the checklist you now use to keep it stable?

We use a WMS called Infor, and we use some other applications that allow us to integrate with common integration apps like Shopify, Magento, Big Commerce, Wayfair, etc. Usually, it takes us as little as a few weeks to get set up to as long as a few months. It really depends on the customer and what they want. Failure points really start to happen when we don’t have good expectations up front with the customer. If we don’t have all the information we need to get started, then timelines slow down and miscommunications happen. We’ve really tried to set expectations, gather all information we can, and communicate clearly from the get go so as to set us and our customer up for success.

Operationally, how do you structure receiving, putaway, pick/pack, and carrier cut-off times so you can hit retail EDI, wholesale, and DTC SLAs simultaneously during peak season?

We talk with the customer first and foremost about the SLA they expect. This ensures we’re able and prepared to meet the SLA that the customer wants. If we’re not able to, we communicate that. Then we’re on the same page. For the most part, we prioritize what work to get done by the SLAs of the customer. Or, we’ll give an account dedicated labor, so that their SLAs are those team member’s sole focus for the day, everyday.

Drilling into accuracy and speed, what concrete changes most improved your inventory accuracy and pick rates—cycle count cadence, slotting rules, labeling, bin sizing—and what before/after KPIs proved the gains?

Truly, it’s really been our technology. Our technology allows us to track where we picked it, who picked it, from where, and what time, and then we track when it shipped out and who approved it. That’s been the biggest difference in our team being able to show the customer that we’re accurate and speedy.

From a people perspective, what’s your playbook for hiring and cross-training 20+ person shifts, and which training or certifications (e.g., IWLA, UT Knoxville) delivered the highest ROI on safety and throughput?

Our HR and leadership team members work to go around to every warehouse 1x a month to update team members on safety training, HR updates, health information, and status of the company. That’s been really impactful to have conversations around safety, productivity, and more. Too, our HR and leadership team visit 1-3 warehouses a week. So there’s a leadership presence at every warehouse every week.

Turning to the customer experience, when onboarding a new brand and SKU catalog, what discovery steps, data validations, and SOPs in the first 30–90 days prevent chargebacks, mislabels, and returns?

We have a series of calls with our new customer or brand. Usually though, it’s hard to not get everything in onboarding. Often, things change or are different. That’s not unusual. That’s the world of supply chain. Things change a lot. So what we do is have a 90 day review. This is a collaborative meeting where we meet with the customer, we give feedback, they give feedback, and we strategize on how to go forward improving and getting better together.

Looking downstream to delivery, given tighter capacity and rising expectations, which tactics have actually improved your last-mile reliability—regional carrier mix, micro-fulfillment nodes, adjusted cut-off windows, or something else—and what did you learn?

We’ve been working on some new updates on this, which I can’t share quite yet. But we’ve been working on more ways to deliver for our customers with transportation and it’s been exciting.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge and expertise. Is there anything else you’d like to add?

This industry is often misunderstood, and it’s often hard to explain. Essentially though, we’re like a hotel for people’s goods. In many ways, we’re taking care of their most valuable assets. So we steward it with care, whether it stays for a day or ships in and out with us for years. We long to be a great hotel and take care of our customers like as if they were guests.