What is Supply Chain Visibility?
As modern supply chains become more complex, organizations are finding it challenging to track their various products while in transit. This lack of visibility can have a negative impact on customer service and cost controls if a disruption in the supply chain takes place. Supply chain visibility allows organizations the ability to view the inventory and activity of their products, offering insights and data that can be used to optimize their supply chain’s efficiency.
1. Mitigating Disruptions
It is important to understand that all supply chains are subject to disruptions. Rising fuel costs, resource scarcity, and government regulations can all impact a supply chain. Even if an organization does everything right, some things are out of its control. However, a supply chain that’s rooted in strong data analysis and communication can limit the potential for these roadblocks, and ensure end-users are not affected.
2. Flexibility
The insights and data gained through visibility allows organizations to react to inefficiencies in a flexible, timely manner. Whether it’s due to a disruption in your supply chain or an inefficient process, visibility can help identify the challenge and even assist in finding solutions to ensure appropriate changes are made that optimize productivity regardless of the circumstances.
3. Business Growth
Insights regarding your supply chain, from where a product is manufactured, all the way to the end-user, can help shape your business strategy. If a “bottle neck” exists in the supply chain, an organization can focus on the source of the issue rather than wasting time and valuable resources on factors that may have little impact on business outcomes.
4. Customer Demands
The ultimate goal of any supply chain is to help organizations meet customer demands. As consumers become more conscious of the products they use and how those products are made, some organizations are leveraging data from their supply chain to satisfy their customer’s demand for more information. Transparency to the consumer can result in increased trust between customers and suppliers. This trust can improve brand loyalty and increase sales.
5. Data Driven Results
Having visibility into all aspects of a supply chain allows organizations access to large amounts of supply chain data. This data can assist in making proactive, data-backed decisions that can keep supply chain performance optimized. Organizations can manage their supply chains with surgical precision, maximizing their ROI by improving processes that have the most impact while reducing the amount of wasted resources.
Investing in supply chain transparency can be costly. But companies making the investment have found value through data that helps them to make more informed decisions. Consumers praise businesses for their transparency and lead to even higher sales from socially conscious or skeptical buyers.