V. MATERIAL FLOW
Problems related to material flow are always faced by 3PL companies. These problems can be related to inventory policy, scheduling of fleet, routing of vehicles, consolidation and warehousing. Many of such material flow challenges can be tackled better using coordination techniques. From the interview with an internationally known 3PL company, which serves an automobile maker to distribute its automobile spare parts received mainly from US and Germany, to twenty-six countries around Asia-Pacific, coordination can be used to overcome the variability introduced by the long delivery lead time, and dynamism from upstream and downstream.