Methodology

3PL Signals exists to give vendors a truthful picture of the operators they sell to. The rules below are the product.

Sources

Public company websites (team, about, locations, news and careers pages), press releases, state business registries, public job boards and public directories whose terms permit reuse. We do not scrape sources whose terms prohibit robots or commercial reuse, we do not buy lists, and we do not infer facts that are not stated.

Verification

Every record is read by a person before it enters the dataset. Each fact family — leader, footprint, technology, locations, services, certifications, signals — carries the URL it was read from and the date. Records are re-verified monthly; a record whose source no longer supports a fact loses that fact rather than keeping a stale value.

Operator grade

Signal observed on the company's own sitePoints
Named operations / leadership team2
WMS or operating technology named1
Footprint (square footage) disclosed1
Multiple locations listed1
Certifications or compliance stated1

A = 5–6 · B = 4 · C = 3 · D = 0–2. The grade is a transparency rubric: it records what an operator discloses publicly, which in our experience correlates with how ready that operator is for a serious vendor conversation. It is never a statement about an operator's quality or competence, and we word every grade as an observation.

Signals

Weekly, for Signals and Enterprise plans: operations-leader changes, new clients announced, new buildings or expansions, technology changes, new certifications. Each signal carries its source and date; we publish nothing we cannot link to.

Corrections and removals

Any subscriber who finds a wrong record gets a correction or an account credit within five business days. Any person or company listed can request a correction or removal on the removal page; we act within five business days and confirm by email.

What we do not do

No email addresses or phone numbers in the public sample. No personal information beyond a person's name, business title and employer as published by that employer. No inferred contact details. No data about the employees of the vendors who subscribe.