A 3PL agreement you cannot measure from a file you hold is not a contract you can manage. It is a relationship with invoices. Data rights, clocks on a miss, and a shorter SLA that can be audited matter more than a long one that can only be presented.
We do not take a commission from the winner. Lawyers finish the clause.
If you cannot measure it, it is not an SLA
Our view is that Australian warehousing and transport agreements still hide the important rights in schedules nobody reads. Who owns the data. How peak is defined. What happens on a miss. How a transition would run. Whether you can leave without asking the supplier for your own volume extract. KPIs that cannot be reproduced from a file you hold are posters. Service levels without a clock are wishes. Rate cards without exception definitions are invitations to argue every month. We would rather a shorter SLA that can be audited than a long one that can be presented in a QBR.
Lawyers finish the contract. Operating people have to live in it. If procurement buys a logo and operations inherit an unmeasurable KPI, the company will retender in two years and be surprised that the leakage followed them. The leakage was never in the logo. It was in the file you did not require. This practice will not take a commission from the 3PL that wins. A practice paid by the winner cannot tell you that the winner's data clause is a lock-in.
Exit is a scored line, not a courtesy
If exit is hard because the data sits with the supplier, you do not have a partnership. You have a lock-in with polite monthly meetings. Write data rights and transition into the demand pack before you invite anyone. Score them. If an incumbent cannot live with that, they should not hold the stock. If a challenger cannot live with that, they should not be on the shortlist. The engagement that turns this into a tender pack is a supplier selection file.