Why should you care about supply chain visibility?
Supply chain visibility means being aware of what is happening in your supply chain. Moreover, although the meaning is simple, it isn’t something that can be achieved easily. Since the past few years, multiple organizations have experienced disruptions in their supply chain due to weather changes, unforeseen circumstances like fire, and natural disasters, for example, storm warnings.
After a thorough analysis of the companies, the observation suggests that most companies were caught off guard since they had a poor supply chain. Furthermore, in some cases, companies were unaware of their supplier’s and sub supplier’s whereabouts. Some of them were also unaware of the critical dependencies.
Supply Chain Visibility
There are various definitions for supply chain visibility. However, the most common one is the ability to track raw materials and components from the original manufacturers and suppliers. It is all through the organization’s manufacturing facilities provided to the customers. In addition, for retail operations, the goods are tracked from the suppliers to the end customers.
When the situation is ideal and the supply chain visibility is good, chief officers have access to the following data
- Supplier’s order receipt
- To complete the order, the status of the raw materials is available
- Manufacturing program and status of the supplier
- Supplier’s delivery date
- Details of shipment
- Regulatory and customer information
- The status of the order regarding the progress plan
If companies want to gain full benefits of supply chain visibility, all the information should be trackable in real-time. However, some organizations can and do achieve this.
A manufacturer has the option to digitize his entire factory to track the transformation of raw material to finished goods. However, they will not be able to keep realistic estimates until they don’t integrate IT into their system with the suppliers. Based on that, there are two parts for visibility
- Operational Visibility
It means that you can gain visibility for your operations, for example, whatever product is under your care can be tracked at any time. Considering a factory, it can be the IoT sensors monitoring machine usage and inventory levels? Moreover, data silos are reduced when the IT network is interconnected.
- Partner Integration
Partner integration means that a company can choose a partner to drive high-level internal visibility. Furthermore, they can also extend it to their supply chain partners. When you have your real-time tracking system, you can easily schedule a suite. This additional integration can help in covering the whole value chain.
Importance of Supply Chain Visibility
Modern supply chains are very complex in most cases. According to the statistics, supply chain complexity is unignorably when supply chain visibility is considered. A lot of companies also had the misconception that their company could achieve complete visibility over internal, inbound, and outbound aspects of the supply chain. Moreover, the surveys were all unanimous and most companies viewed the importance of improving supply chain visibility for availability and on-time delivery. In addition, companies with full supply chain visibility achieved a higher EBIT on average.
