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).