III. LAYERS OF 3PL CHALLENGES
Logistics planning attempts to make decision at three different levels, namely strategic, tactical and operational. These three levels are differentiated by their planning horizon, where strategic level is in years, tactical level in months, and operational level in weeks and days. Here, the 3PL challenges are differentiated by their level of tangibility as shown in Fig. 2. At the top level is the Logistics Network Configuration layer (most tangible), to Material Flow layer, to Information Flow layer, and finally to Relationship Management layer (least tangible).