In today’s volatile supply chain environment, few third-party logistics companies exemplify customer empowerment and industry innovation like Sunland Logistics Solutions, headquartered out of South Carolina. The 3PL solutions provider recently marked it’s 40th anniversary in providing value added services to a wide range of customers in the automotive, retail/e-commerce, industrial and chemical industries. Their reputation for being a strategic partner and delivering value to their customers has led to Sunland being perennially named as one of Inbound Logistics “Top 100 3PLs.”

Heading into the next era of the company, Sunland has expanded its solutions to the west coast and is now a nationwide logistics provider for globally recognized industry leaders. “Our ultimate goal is to provide quantitative value to our customers,” stated Hari Sivaprakasam, COO of Sunland. The growing 3PL serves a wide range of customers and brands including Panasonic, Delta Faucet and Scott Miracle Gro.

“In order to grow and embrace continuous improvement we focus on three things – having the right team in place, the right processes and meaningful technology that drives business results.” An example of new technologies Sunland has been actively using at their warehouse locations include solutions from Vimaan, the computer vision start-up based out of Santa Clara, California.“Vimaan does a lot of different things for us, it does empty bin audits, it reads lables in each location, and compares it to the WMS so you can check against the system looking for exception cases and, in some instances, integrating to allow Vimaan to update our WMS as well; therefore, taking the human element out of it.”

Like other 3PLs, employee churn is a challenge that Sunland addresses. “We have also mounted the Vimaan computer vision technology on our forklifts, so you can make sure products are going to the right location…we can audit more items going out the door without adding more headcount” stated Sivaprakasam. “Before where we used to have a 5–7-person cycle counting team, we can now have a 2-3 highly trained member team that can deploy the technology to get the job done with higher accuracy rates.”
Headed into their 40th year and this new era of supply chain operations, Sunland continues to build on their framework to deliver industry leading service and meaningful innovation using collaborative lean processes and leading-edge technology like Vimaan. As a strategic partner for supply chain services, the 3PL is positioned to support brands across the county dealing with increased customer demand, storage and challenges or in need of flex support for peak season.