What is Supply Chain Visibility and How To Get It

What is Supply Chain Visibility?

Supply chain visibility is a company’s ability to know what is going on within its supply chains with respect to the participants, products, journey, and risks. It can vary depending on the information, intent, industry, investment, and involvement of a company. Supply chain visibility can also vary depending on whether it is upstream or downstream, real-time or historical, and inside or outside the company’s operations.

Supply chain visibility helps detect bottlenecks, anticipate disruptions, identify various types of risks, and make well-grounded decisions in the shortest possible time. Improved visibility ensures higher efficiency, lower costs, and better risk and compliance management.

It builds trust and closer collaboration among all stakeholders involved—from suppliers, customers, insurers, and investors—by providing relevant information on the status, health, and compliance of the supply chain to every actor.

The ideal supply chain visibility includes the tracing of raw materials, production, inventory levels, and finally, delivery of finished products to customers, and all the processes within. Vast amounts of inputs and advanced technologies are involved in achieving supply chain visibility, from tracking devices, blockchain, global trade data, to sophisticated analytics. These tools provide detailed insight and increased transparency into a company's and its supply chain’s processes.

Supply chain visibility has risen to be one of the top priorities of industry players. This trend can be seen, mostly, as an effect of the pandemic that translated into the drive to become more resilient. Supply chain visibility allows business leaders to get real-time information on all activities, components, and relationships of their supply chain. They can track or identify the journey of goods/products from manufacturing to the end-use.

The goal is to fetch useful insights on the supply chain positioning, operations, inefficiencies, non-compliance, and potential risks to achieve supply chain optimization best practices and maxime resilience.

How to Gain Supply Chain Visibility?

While working out a plan is unique to every business case for improving visibility, here are a few simple yet crucial methods you can weave in.

1. Introduce Integrated Software Solutions

We have seen how technology saved the supply chain from crashing down entirely during the pandemic. Digital technologies like data analytics, AI, automation, etc. are proving great at strengthening the supply chains, as per the Supply Chain Trends Report by KPMG. Along with supply chain management tools, auditing systems and automating required processes will help enhance visibility along with boosting efficiency, time management, and error reduction.

While opting for digital technologies, ensuring proper training of the workforce is necessary to avoid points of failures. Integrate applications, workforce, and information properly to achieve the intended supply chain visibility.

Implement tracking systems by leveraging technologies such as GPS and RFID, enabling real-time monitoring of all shipments, inventory, and equipment across the entire supply chain. This way provides accurate location and status updates, enhancing visibility and efficiency at large.

Supply chain management or enterprise resource planning systems provide a single consolidated view of inventory, orders, and supplier performance. These tools help facilitate the smooth flow of operations by offering critical insights needed throughout the supply chain.

2. Implement Supply Chain Mapping Tools

The supply chain mapping tools bring the widest coverage in supply chain visibility by giving a view of the entire supply chain network. The tools permit one to draw a visual representation of all entities in the supply chain, from suppliers to end customers, identifying each node and flows between the nodes.

This visualization helps in understanding the complexity of the supply chain and identifying potential bottlenecks, delays, and risks. By having a clear map of the supply chain, companies can better manage bottlenecks, optimize processes and costs, and ensure timeliness, thereby improving overall efficiency. This proactive approach to supply chain management enhances resilience and social responsibility.

Knowing what is supply chain mapping helps discover and analyze risks within the supply chain. Organizations can visualize all their suppliers down to the multi-tier level, thus being able to conduct risk assessments concerning UFLPA non-compliance, geo-political scenarios, and supplier reliability.

These details are relevant for making decisions on contingency planning and supply-base diversification in order to reduce risk exposure or avoid infractions are provided. This is how Apple Inc. was able to quickly adapt to the disruptions caused by COVID-19 and keep running production at usual levels.

3. Utilize Data Analytics

Use data analytics tools to build an understanding of both historical and real-time data to forecast demands, track performances, and identify any potential problems in advance for proactive decision-making.

It is extremely important to skim and analyze the supply chain data to identify the operational shortcomings, determine the KPIs, and even develop practical solutions. Knowing what is supply chain analytics can go a long way in generating actionable insights on process and performance optimization.

Improving supply chain visibility gets easier with the crucial KPIs for supply chain monitoring in place. They will help assess goals and achievements concerning your business. With the results, you can introduce further improvements to the system. At this stage, remember to collaborate on the progress reports with business partners. This will promote transparency and trust across your supply chain network when it comes to data sharing.

4. Improve Communication Channels

One of the primary steps that can be taken to enhance supply chain visibility is achieving cohesive communication with stakeholders at all levels. This will require collaboration with key vendors/suppliers, department managers, retailers, logistics service providers, and even competitors. With the ensuing aim of gain for all, building a network of stakeholders that trust, collaborate, and share information actively is key. Better communication will mean more transparency, better coordination, and timely responses to any change or disruption.

The direct result of this will be a streamlined information flow with several benefits for supply chains. This will also help with better analysis and understanding of the positioning of the supply chain. It will also allow easier identification of supply chain bottlenecks for faster redressal.

5. Identify Issues and Set Improvement Goals

The information and data will help identify the bottlenecks in supply chains and their overall impact. This can be done by process flow mapping. It involves laying out all the elements and functions of the supply chain followed by finding out the weak points. One can achieve better results by sharing the data with other stakeholders and reviewing it thoroughly.

This will generate a clear image of the required improvements in the supply chain. They can then follow up with building execution strategies, setting deadlines, building the right teams, etc. to achieve them. Don’t forget to share the issues and solutions with the stakeholders to get better insights, knowledge of market trends, and higher efficiency.

6. Automate Reporting

Run real-time reports of key supply chain metrics by using automated reporting tools. Automated reporting enables quick decision-making, on-time responses to disruptions, and ongoing continuous improvement in the performance of the supply chain.

Reporting automation can bring about a very high level of supply chain visibility through effective data collection, analysis, and presentation with real-time insights that enhance decision-making. Reporting systems automate the continuous collection of data from all aspects of the supply chain, including procurement, production, inventory management, and distribution.

This real-time aggregation of data allows companies to track supply chain operations without interruption by locating bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and potential disruptions. Advanced analytics can berun on this data to generate comprehensive reports that bring out key performance indicators, trends, and anomalies, enabling proactive management.

Moreover, reporting automation reduces manual effort in data processing, hence the number of errors and increasing the accuracy of the information. This facility gives an access to customized reports based on the stakeholder's requirements, hence improving the communication among the departments.

Managers in supply chain management can take corrective measures swiftly for any kind of deviation from the norm through the facility of automated alerts and notifications, ensuring that small problems do not become big ones.

With historical data and predictive analytics, automated reporting is also best-placed to foreshadow difficulties and opportunities of the future. More discrete supply chain efficiencies, cost savings, and higher customer satisfaction go a long way in making for better strategic planning and resource allocation in management systems.

Gaining Visibility Isn't Easy

Achieving end-to-end supply chain visibility is not a day’s job. Achieving supply chain transparency may require revisiting and revamping strategies and introducing changes frequently. Consistent efforts have to be put into improving operational processes and redefining business goals according to the goals. Set the wheels rolling to gain visibility across your supply chains and strengthen it for competitive advantage.

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